What Does the Bible Say About Hell? Three Views of Hell the Church Has Never Fully Settled

Sarah grew up in a church that knew exactly what happened when you died without Jesus. She had heard it described from the pulpit with enough graphic specificity that it lodged in her imagination as a child and never quite left. Fire. Darkness. Conscious, unending torment. Forever.

She believed it, more or less, the way children believe the things their trusted adults tell them. She believed it through confirmation class and youth group and her first years of college. She believed it until the night her father died: a kind, decent man who had never made a profession of faith, who had loved her mother faithfully for thirty-eight years, who had quietly driven her to church every Sunday without ever walking through the doors himself.

She sat with that image for a long time after the funeral. Her father. Conscious. Burning. Forever.

It wasn’t anger that walked her out of the church. It was a quieter thing: the growing inability to hold together the God she had encountered in prayer and Scripture: the one who ran toward the prodigal, who sought the lost sheep, who wept at Lazarus’s tomb: with the God who would subject her father to infinite suffering for a finite life of sincere but incomplete seeking. The math didn’t work. The character didn’t cohere.

She didn’t stop believing in God. She stopped believing in that version of God. And with nowhere to put the difference, she slowly stopped going to church at all.

Sarah is a composite, but her story is not rare. It is, in fact, one of the most common threads in the fabric of contemporary deconversion. And what is striking, what the Church has too rarely said plainly, is that her theological instinct was not wrong. She was not failing to trust God. She was detecting a real tension, one that serious Christian scholars have wrestled with for centuries, between the character of God as revealed in Jesus and the specific doctrine of eternal conscious torment as it developed in the Western church.

The problem was not her faith. It may have been her doctrine.

A Doctrine the Church Has Never Fully Settled

Here is something most Christians are never told: the Church has never spoken with one voice on the nature of hell.

The ecumenical councils that defined the Trinity, the two natures of Christ, and the canon of Scripture never produced a binding, creedal statement on the precise nature of final punishment. What became the dominant Western position, eternal conscious torment, the view Sarah absorbed in childhood, owes much of its specific shape to Augustine of Hippo in the fifth century and was further systematized in the medieval period. It is not the unanimous testimony of the early church. Origen of Alexandria, one of the most brilliant theologians of the third century, held a form of universalism. Irenaeus, whom we have met in other Levaire articles for his chronological limitations, held views closer to what we now call conditionalism. The Eastern Orthodox tradition has always maintained more theological flexibility on final judgment than its Western counterparts.

This is not an argument that tradition is wrong. It is an argument that on this specific question, the tradition is more contested than most people in the pew have been led to believe.

Three positions have been seriously held by serious Christians across the centuries, each with genuine scriptural support and genuine scriptural difficulties. They deserve to be named, examined, and weighed honestly.

Eternal Conscious Torment: The Traditional View of Hell

The traditionalist position, held by the majority of Western Christianity for over a millennium, holds that the unsaved dead will experience conscious torment in hell for eternity, without end or relief. This is the view of Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, and much of the evangelical tradition up to the present day.

Its primary scriptural anchor is Matthew 25:46, where Jesus speaks of the unrighteous going away into aiōnios punishment while the righteous enter aiōnios life. The argument runs: if the life is eternal, the punishment must be equally eternal, since the same Greek word governs both. Revelation 20:10 describes the devil, the beast, and the false prophet being “tormented day and night forever and ever” in the lake of fire. Mark 9:48 quotes Jesus describing a place “where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched,” drawn from Isaiah 66:24.

Traditionalism takes Jesus’ warning language with full seriousness, which is one of its genuine strengths. Jesus spoke about hell more than almost any other figure in the New Testament, and he did not speak about it casually. The traditionalist argues that softening the doctrine drains the warnings of their force and risks producing a theology where the stakes of human choices are ultimately inconsequential.

But the position carries significant difficulties.

The first is philosophical. Traditionalism as inherited by the Western church assumed the Greek doctrine of the natural immortality of the soul: the idea that human souls are inherently indestructible and therefore cannot simply cease to exist after death. This is not a distinctly Hebrew or biblical concept. The Hebrew anthropology of the Old Testament does not assume the soul’s natural immortality; it understands human life as dependent, contingent, sustained by God’s breath. Importing Greek assumptions about the indestructible soul into biblical texts about final judgment requires more justification than the tradition has typically provided.

The first difficulty is also compounded by what Scripture says about the ancient understanding of the state of the dead — though the picture here is more complex than a simple “soul sleep” argument allows. From the earthly perspective, the dead are consistently described in the Hebrew scriptures as knowing nothing, descending into Sheol, the underworld beneath the earth (Psalm 63:9), a place of silence and shadow. Solomon asks plainly, “Do not all go to one place?” (Ecclesiastes 6:6). Paul, writing of believers who have died, uses the language of sleep (1 Thessalonians 4:13-14). From the earthly vantage point, the dead are simply gone.

But the ethereal perspective is different. Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) depicts a Sheol in which the dead retain consciousness, memory, and the capacity for suffering and comfort — divided by a chasm between torment and Abraham’s bosom. When Jesus spent three days “in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40), Peter tells us He preached to the disobedient spirits held there (1 Peter 3:18-20), which implies they were conscious enough to be preached to. So the pre-resurrection underworld, at least, was not a state of blank unconsciousness.

What this means for the traditionalist position is nuanced. Conscious existence in Sheol is not the same as eternal conscious torment in the lake of fire. And when Ephesians 4:8 describes Christ ascending with “a host of captives,” the Old Testament saints in Paradise were led out — the landscape of the afterlife changed at the resurrection. The question the traditionalist must still answer is whether the lake of fire, the second death of Revelation 20, preserves the damned in conscious suffering forever, or whether it does what fire and death ordinarily do.

The second difficulty is the character question Sarah encountered. If God is the one the New Testament describes: the one who is love (1 John 4:8), who desires all people to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4), who takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked (Ezekiel 18:23): then the deliberate, ongoing, eternal infliction of suffering on finite creatures for finite sins requires a theory of justice that many thoughtful Christians have found difficult to sustain. This is not a sentimental objection. It is a serious theological one.

There is also a pastoral indictment buried in the traditionalist position that rarely gets named. If eternal conscious torment is true — if your neighbor, your coworker, your unsaved father is headed for infinite conscious suffering — then the relative ease with which most traditionalist Christians conduct their daily lives is a damning indictment of the doctrine itself. Genuine belief in ECT should set the Church on fire for evangelism. It should make comfortable pew-sitting a moral impossibility. That it does not — that Christians who formally affirm eternal conscious torment spend their weeks largely undisturbed by the eternal fate of those around them — suggests that even those who hold the doctrine do not fully believe it. A theology that produces so little urgency in its own adherents deserves to be interrogated.

Third, the language of “destruction” and “death” that the New Testament uses for final judgment is difficult to square with a state of ongoing conscious existence, however miserable. Paul writes in Romans 6:23 that “the wages of sin is death” — though it is worth noting this may refer to spiritual death, the state of separation from God that is the default condition of the unredeemed, rather than a future event of annihilation. Jesus warns in Matthew 10:28 to fear the one who can “destroy both soul and body in hell.” John 3:16 sets the stakes not between eternal bliss and eternal torment but between eternal life and perishing — a contrast sharpened by Jesus’ words in John 6:50-51, where he distinguishes the bread of life from the manna eaten by the forefathers who died: those who eat of him will not die in the ultimate sense, even though they die physically. 2 Thessalonians 1:9 describes final punishment as “eternal destruction.” If the second death means death, why does the tradition insist it means eternal life in torment?

Annihilationism and Conditionalism: Does Hell Mean Destruction?

Conditionalism: sometimes called annihilationism, though its proponents often prefer conditionalism: holds that immortality is not inherent to human nature but is a gift granted by God to those who are in Christ. Those who are not in Christ do not possess immortality and will not be sustained in conscious existence after final judgment. They will, as the language of Scripture repeatedly suggests, die. Perish. Be destroyed. Cease.

This is not a modern liberal invention. It was held by Irenaeus, by Arnobius of Sicca, by various strands of the early church. In the modern era it has been defended with rigorous scholarship by Edward Fudge in The Fire That Consumes (1982), by John Stott: one of the most respected evangelical figures of the twentieth century, who described himself as “tentatively” holding this position, and more recently by scholars including Christopher Date and Glenn Peoples.

The conditionalist case begins with the biblical language itself. The wages of sin, Paul writes in Romans 6:23, is death: not eternal life in suffering, but death, the cessation of life. Jesus in Matthew 10:28 warns his hearers to fear the one who can “destroy both soul and body in hell.” Destroy. Not torment forever. The Greek word is apollumi, which means to destroy, to ruin, to cause to perish. John 3:16, the most famous verse in the Bible, sets the contrast not between eternal bliss and eternal torment but between eternal life and perishing. 2 Thessalonians 1:9 describes the fate of those who do not know God as “eternal destruction” — aiōnios destruction, destruction that belongs to the age to come and from which there is no return.

The fire imagery throughout Scripture, conditionalists argue, is the imagery of consumption, not preservation. Fire in the ancient world destroyed things. The unquenchable fire of Mark 9 is a fire that cannot be extinguished prematurely — not a fire that burns eternally beyond the exhaustion of its fuel. The same phrase appears in Jeremiah 17:27, where God threatens Jerusalem with an unquenchable fire. That fire went out. The point was its certainty and completeness, not its literal endlessness. Malachi 4:1 makes the consumption imagery explicit: “For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says the LORD of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch.” Stubble consumed entirely. Nothing remaining. That is the image the Old Testament offers, and it coheres naturally with the conditionalist reading.

Even the Matthew 25:46 anchor text, where Jesus uses aiōnios for both punishment and life, does not necessarily require eternal conscious torment. The punishment is aiōnios in the sense that it belongs to the age to come and is irreversible, not necessarily in the sense that it consists of unending conscious suffering. The result of the punishment is permanent; the process need not be.

Conditionalism takes seriously both the warning language of Jesus, the second death is real, final, and not to be minimized, and the biblical portrait of God as one who gives life rather than one who sustains his enemies in agony for eternity. It reads the consistent metaphors of Scripture (death, destruction, perishing, consuming fire) at something close to face value rather than redefining them through the lens of Greek immortality.

Its weaknesses are real but limited. Revelation 20:10 is the hardest text, describing torment “day and night forever and ever” in the lake of fire. Conditionalists typically note that this verse refers specifically to the devil, the beast, and the false prophet — not to humanity in general. More importantly, the beast (representing Rome) and the false prophet (representing unbelieving Jerusalem) may represent not merely earthly institutions but the fallen angelic princes driving them, as Daniel 10 makes clear in its portrait of the princes of Persia and Greece as spiritual powers behind human kingdoms. Throwing spiritual entities “alive into the lake of fire” carries different implications than throwing mortal human beings there. Revelation 14:11 is similarly challenging. These texts require careful handling and the conditionalist case is stronger in the Pauline letters than in the highly symbolic imagery of Revelation.

Christian Universalism: Will Everyone Eventually Be Saved?

Universalism holds that all human beings will ultimately be reconciled to God: that hell, if it exists, is remedial rather than retributive, and that the love of God will eventually reach every soul. In its more sophisticated forms, universalism does not deny judgment or even a period of suffering after death; it denies that such judgment is the final word.

The position has ancient roots in Origen and has found modern defenders in Thomas Talbott, David Bentley Hart (whose That All Shall Be Saved is the most philosophically rigorous recent statement of the case), and in more popular form in Rob Bell’s Love Wins. It draws on passages like 1 Corinthians 15:22 (“as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive”), Colossians 1:20 (God reconciling “all things” to himself through Christ), Romans 5:18 (“one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men”), and the vision of Philippians 2:10-11 where every knee bows and every tongue confesses.

There is genuine pastoral beauty in universalism, and its instinct, that the love of God is more powerful than human rebellion, is not wrong. The texts it marshals are real texts, not invented ones, and the universalist reading of “all” in Paul’s letters deserves more engagement than it typically receives from traditionalists who assume their reading is obvious.

But universalism faces a problem it has never fully resolved: Jesus.

The Jesus of the Gospels does not read like a universalist. A caveat is necessary here: several of Jesus’ sharpest-sounding exclusion sayings are primarily about entry into the present kingdom of God rather than the final state of souls after death. The narrow gate (Matthew 7:13-14), the many called but few chosen (Matthew 22:14), the servant beaten for disobedience (Luke 12:47) — these are kingdom sayings, addressed to first-century Israel about response to the in-breaking reign of God, and reading them straightforwardly as afterlife geography requires more care than they are usually given.

But Matthew 25:31-46 is harder to dismiss. The sheep and the goats are separated at the final judgment, and the goats “depart into eternal punishment” while the righteous enter eternal life. This is not a kingdom-entry saying. It is an eschatological judgment scene, and it describes a genuine and apparently permanent division. Whatever aiōnios means here — and the conditionalist reading of that word as “belonging to the age to come” is legitimate — the text does not suggest all roads lead home.

Some traditionalists reach for the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31), where a great chasm prevents movement between torment and paradise. But this is a weaker text than it first appears. The scene depicts Sheol as it existed before Christ’s resurrection — the divided underworld of first-century Jewish expectation, not the post-resurrection state. When Ephesians 4:8 describes Christ ascending with “a host of captives,” the Old Testament saints in Paradise were led out. The pre-cross image of Sheol cannot be straightforwardly mapped onto the final state. The parable tells us something about the urgency of response in this life; it is less reliable as a diagram of the permanent afterlife.

Revelation 20 adds a final difficulty for universalism that is easy to overlook. Verse 15 states plainly: “Anyone not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.” But verse 14 has already told us what the lake of fire is: “the second death.” Not eternal life in suffering — death. And the very framing of not being found in the book of life implies absence of life, not perpetuation of it in another form. The universalist must explain why those whose names are absent from the book of life experience anything other than what that absence implies.

The stronger anti-universalist case rests not on any single saying but on the cumulative pattern: Jesus consistently speaks of human choices as carrying ultimate weight, of a day of accounting, of outcomes that differ. The universalist must explain why Jesus spoke so urgently, so repeatedly, and so graphically about the dangers of exclusion if exclusion was ultimately impossible. The conditionalist and the traditionalist both have a straightforward answer: because the danger was real. The universalist’s answer requires more moves.

Universalism is the most hopeful of the three positions and the least exegetically stable. It captures something true: that God’s love is relentless, that the scope of redemption in Scripture is breathtaking, while straining against the plain force of Jesus’ own warnings.

Which View of Hell Does the Bible Actually Support?

Laying the three positions side by side, a few things become clear.

Traditionalism carries the weight of the Western theological tradition and takes Jesus’ warnings with full seriousness. But it imports philosophical assumptions about the immortality of the soul that Scripture does not clearly endorse, and it produces a portrait of God’s eternal activity that many careful readers, not just sentimentalists, but rigorous theologians, have found difficult to reconcile with the character of the one Jesus called Father.

Universalism honors the scope of God’s love and the breadth of Paul’s cosmic redemption language. But it runs into Jesus, and Jesus is not easily gotten around.

Conditionalism reads the consistent biblical metaphors for final judgment at something close to their natural meaning. Death means death. Destruction means destruction. Fire consumes. The lost perish. It does not require Greek philosophical scaffolding. It does not require explaining away Jesus’ warnings. And it does not require imagining that the God who is love sustains his enemies in conscious agony for eternity as some kind of cosmic demonstration. The second death is real, final, and terrible. It is also, on the conditionalist reading, death, which is what the text says it is.

The weight of the exegetical evidence, read without the assumptions the Western tradition inherited from Greek philosophy, falls most naturally here.

What People Leaving the Church Over Hell Need to Hear

None of this is to say these questions are simple, or that those who hold traditionalism are intellectually dishonest, or that the pastoral stakes of the debate are not real. They are very real.

But Sarah needed to know that the theological tradition she was handed was not the only option: that serious, biblically committed scholars have read the same texts and arrived at different conclusions, and that her instinct that something was wrong with the picture she had been given was not a failure of faith. It may have been the beginning of a more careful theology.

What can be said with confidence across all three positions is this: the New Testament is not primarily a document about hell. It is a document about Jesus, and about the life that is available in him. The warnings about final judgment, whatever their precise meaning, are in service of an invitation, not a threat. The door that the warnings point away from is not the main subject. The door they point toward is.

That door, every tradition agrees, is open. It is open now. And the one standing at it, according to the last book of the Bible, is not a judge with a ledger but a lamb that was slain: the same one who wept at Lazarus’s tomb, who ran toward the prodigal, who told a thief dying beside him that today they would be together in paradise.

Sarah’s father may have encountered that lamb in ways she never saw. She does not know. None of us know the precise geography of grace. But the God she walked away from, the one defined primarily by his capacity for infinite retribution, may not be the God the New Testament actually describes.

That conversation is worth having. The church, at its best, has always known it.

References

Edwards, David L., and John Stott. Essentials: A Liberal-Evangelical Dialogue. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1988. (Stott’s tentative conditionalism appears in the section on final punishment.)

Fudge, Edward. The Fire That Consumes: A Biblical and Historical Study of the Doctrine of Final Punishment. 3rd ed. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011. amazon.com/dp/1610971469

Hart, David Bentley. That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. amazon.com/dp/0300246226

Peterson, Robert A. Hell on Trial: The Case for Eternal Punishment. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1995.

Scriptures

Matthew 7:13-14; 10:28; 12:40; 22:14; 25:31-46 — Mark 9:48 — Luke 12:47; 16:19-31 — John 3:16; 6:50-51 — Romans 5:18; 6:23 — 1 Corinthians 15:22 — Philippians 2:10-11 — Colossians 1:20 — 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14 — 2 Thessalonians 1:9 — 1 Timothy 2:4 — 1 Peter 3:18-20 — 1 John 4:8 — Ephesians 4:8 — Revelation 14:11; 20:14-15 — Ezekiel 18:23 — Ecclesiastes 6:6; 9:5 — Psalm 63:9; 115:17 — Malachi 4:1 — Daniel 10:13-21