I Changed My Mind About Hell When I Realized These 24 Things
In today’s post:
‣ Few Recent Podcasts/YouTubes I’ve Been On
‣ 24 Ways I Chunked My Way Outta Hell (in audio or downloadable pdf)
‣ Some of the Many Resources for Today’s Post
‣ Few Recent Podcasts/YouTubes I’ve Been On
Where’s the Grief, hosted by comedian, Jordon Ferber, from NY, who started the show to help process the loss of his brother and to help others in their loss. Honestly, I wasn’t surprised to have such a thoughtful discussion with a comedian. I have long thought, that there’s a lot going on with people who make a living out of thinking their way through the process of telling a joke.
The Bible Uncut and Unfiltered, with host Colin Conner, who I met at Theology Beer Camp. Colin does a great job and I’m thankful for his work. (Btw, the dates for 2025’s Theology Beer Camp with
are Oct 16-18.)I loved being with my friend, Rebecca Adam,s and the Theology and Peace people where I shared something called “The Nothing That’s Become Something.” My thoughts about such things as absence and the crossover between grief, desire, Girard, and open and relational theology are still evolving but we had a great discussion.
‣ 24 Ways I “Chunked” My Way Outta Hell
What is chunking?
The word chunk is used differently by various psychologists and scientists. It can be a noun or a verb, as something one does consciously or subconsciously, and any of these ideas might apply to how I use them in this writing. It refers to the way our brains break big ideas down into manageable “chunks” to keep information organized while formulating new ways of thinking. Without this ability, getting overwhelmed with all the data wouldn't take much. As one walks through an entrance to a maze that itself leads to an entire garden, so chunking acts like walking through doorways that lead into entire gardens of thought.
The point of this writing is not to flood you with all the garden knowledge I have (honestly, there are a lot of weeds in the garden, so you don't want all of it anyhow) but instead to give the chunks that over the course of about two years, allowed a whole new way of thinking to open up for me. Don't be misled by each point's brevity, for it might have taken me hours, sometimes months and years, of reading, thinking, and reflecting to boil some of these ideas down to a sentence or two. And thank God I did gain a whole new way of thinking because it gave me a new way to keep the idea of love at play whenever I interacted with the idea of hell.
Never Abandoned by Love
Let me put it this way … despite the massive loss (and losses) I had experienced, I never got the sense that love had abandoned me. I got the sense that something had abandoned me, and at times, it certainly felt like God, but once I reworked expansive and non-sacrificial ideas of love into my imagination, I started thinking, "Oh, maybe that old thing wasn't really God."
Furthermore, keeping love at play, even in discussions about hell, gave me just enough freedom to say that everything might be thought of in light of a movement that was redemptive and good. I mean, given love's faithfulness in the past, it wasn’t a stretch to say that love would be faithful in the future.
Much of my work had to do with disassembling and reassembling the concept of love itself. My concept was run and re-run through a matrix of mimetic theory, open and relational theology, and my lived experience as a father to the point that I began thinking of it differently than I previously had thought of it. Interestingly enough, I started chunking the definition of love itself into the following thought:
Here you go: Love is an uncontrolling, non-violent, non-binary, non-scapegoating energy in relationship with the divine and the world that's meant for the non-complete flourishing of everyone and everything.
This got me thinking that love was a healthier and, for those who care about such things, a more biblical image of God. And chunking God that way (which is a weird phrase to say) allowed me to deconstruct the narrative that I had inherited from Americanized-christianity regarding alot of things, such as atonement, sexuality, eschatolgy, and today's topic of punishment and hell.
It's funny; the chunks came to me, in a way, as my own, and yet, I am deeply indebted to dozens of thinkers, poets, and writers for helping me get there. Or as the poet Lee Welch says …
Like everything else I have,
somebody showed it to me,
and I found it all by myself.
I changed my mind about hell when I realized …
that being merciful takes more strength than being judgmental.
how many "loving people" were upset over my refusal to condemn certain people to a place devoid of love. 🫤
that the main Greek and Hebrew terms (Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, Tartarus) were not equal to the English word “hell” with its punitive-judgment-eternal-flames-never-quench God's-burning-wrath meaning.
even more, despite the different and sometimes contrasting terms from which we get the English word hell,” that the biblical writers all shared a common denominator: a potential end (which is, in and of itself, a serious challenge to americanized-christianity's presuppositions about divine punishment.)
that if I got to heaven but learned a family member, say a child, was in hell … not only would I NOT worship God all the more … I wouldn't even stay! You think I'm sticking around heaven in that kind of scenario? No, man, saddle the horses; I'm going after my kid. 🏇🏻
I couldn't imagine any God-forsaken space in the entire cosmos.
that yes, judgment is real, but the judgment is love and I knew this wasn't a cop-out because sometimes love is incredibly challenging and painful.
the literalists were obsessed with reading punishment, wrath, and fire as literal and love as metaphorical vs. the other way around, and I thought, "Well, that's wrong.” (If fire is involved, it’d be good to keep Song of Solomon 8:6 in mind: “Love burns like fire, the brightest kind of flame.”)
that I'd never torture my kid once, let alone for eternity. Why would I imagine God doing such a thing?
that in The Prodigal Son story, the one in the worst shape is the brother, who represents the religious crowd.
that religious people (my people) are usually the last to get it: to believe that those who don't think like us are going to hell after they die is to be living in a type of hell while we are alive. 👈🏼
that if "every knee bows/every tongue confesses," it won't be out of coercive fear. It'll be that love—maybe like the weightiest gravity—just makes it so easy to bow and confess. I mean, could it even be called love if coercive fear is involved?
how ridiculous it would be for God to command us to love our enemies while he punished his.
after looking into passages like Romans 1, that there is a healthier, more interesting, if not biblical, way to interpret wrath. I got this idea from
, but wrath can be seen as "God's divine consent to our self-destructive choices." It's a much more robust idea than God simply being angry about our behavior.Gehenna, which translators historically rendered as 'hell,' was actually a cursed valley beyond Jerusalem's walls. This was where kings, both foreign and Jewish, sacrificed children to satisfy their gods. Holding this image alongside the doctrine of Penal Substitutionary Atonement—the story of a son who was sacrificed outside Jerusalem's walls to satisfy God's wrath—gave me reason to pause. 😳
that the biblical writers shared no unified concept of hell, drawing instead from diverse metaphors—laundry tubs, refiner's fire, garbage dumps, dungeons, darkness, and sulfurous lakes. They envisioned various scenarios: purgatory-like states, annihilation where people ceased to exist, and importantly, situations where divine love never relented, eventually allowing the outcast to enter heaven's gates.
after reading The Great Divorce, that hell could be an experience we have due to our own choosing. (Also, I realized that the evangelicals who seemed to love C.S. Lewis had either never read The Great Divorce or had ignored what he wrote because it contradicted so much of what they taught about divine punishment.)
the early church fathers like Origen, Clement, Basil, and Gregory all taught a type of universalism.
there might be hope for some beyond this life because the crucifixion-resurrection story contained an in-between part where Jesus preached the good news in the land of the dead.
that at the end of Scripture, Jesus says he is making all things new, which doesn't necessarily do away with punishment, per se, but it does give us hope that something good might still be recycled out of all the pain.
that the gates of heaven, as John the Revelator tells it, will never be shut.
I was more interested in a God who liked the outsiders as much as the insiders.
that a God of non-violence is way more compelling than a God of violence. This was true when I looked …
-at the origin story I had inherited, which essentially told me that for God to create, he had to descend from somewhere else to dominate and conquer the immoral, amorphous chaos …
-or at the atonement story I had inherited, which basically told me that for God to forgive, he had to have a perfect sacrifice killed and offered to him …
-or at the future-justice-project God was ushering in that I had inherited, which, more or less, told me that for God to be able to restore everything, he would have to violently destroy evil and anyone associated.
All of these seemed to be responses that put our ultimate hope in violence more than love, and though I couldn’t deny that there were some injustices I personlly wanted to end—violently or not—I just thought a non-violent God was more compelling.
restorative justice was greater than retributive justice, which really isn't justice at all. Look, any God can punish, but it takes a real God to redeem, restore, and put people on the path of justice. Justice is probably the depth of what needs to be wrestled with when it comes to any discussions about heaven, hell, punishment, and hope for the future.
Allow me a personal story about my sister, something that isn’t easy to write … at one level … I'm glad that the one who perpetrated a violent crime against my sister is behind bars, but at another level, I admit, it does nothing for my sister. It does keep the person from doing something similar to someone else, and that, of course, is important. But it does nothing for my sister. Irrespective of how much or how long the criminal is punished, she is never coming home again.
However, suppose the story of restorative justice is true; that there’s an experience beyond this life where the unjust go through the fire of God’s love. In that case, eventually, there's a chance that the criminal might genuinely ask for forgiveness of my sister … her parents, family, God, and the whole universe ... and in doing so, will unclench his hold on violence, which, in turn, will unclench the hold violence has had on him.
This unclenching would obviously be good for the criminal, but here’s the thing … it’d be good for all of us. Trust me, I do not ask such things lightly, but what’s going to mend such a violent rupture as murder? Enforced incarceration for all eternity or giving someone a chance to own his crime and genuinely ask for forgiveness? As challenging as all this is, I think it’s the latter.
Take My Punishment
Well, there you go … 24 ways I chunked my way out of hell and started helping others do the same. Each one of them could be “double-clicked” and their implications considered at length.
Of course, after I began sharing these, the real work began because people started pointing fingers (literally) and saying that by believing this way meant I was the one in danger of going to hell. Which was odd because I had just finished telling them that I didn’t really believe in the place they were now saying I would go. 🤔
Haha, over the years, I’ve learned to respond the best I can, which usually involves me taking a breath and saying something like, "You know, if I'm sent to hell over my insistence …
-that mercy is greater than sacrifice,
-that love is more enduring than fear,
-and that good fathers always welcome their children home?
Then so be it. I'll take my punishment."
I hope you’ll check out the resources below, leave a comment, and … share all of this with a friend.
✌🏼
Jonathan
‣ Some of the many resources for today’s post
Reading Revelation Responsibly, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut, The Uncontrolling Love of God, Reversed Thunder, Razing Hell, That All Shall be Saved, The Suffering of God, Deconstructing Hell, Facing Apocalypse, and
’s Is Eternal Life Real?
This is really helpful. The only thing I would maybe push back on a bit is the interpretation of hell as consequence. I understand how that could seem better than God just arbitrarily sending somebody to hell.
However, the church I grew up in — church of Christ, so fundamentalist ultra literal reading of the Bible— made that same argument, and it ran something like this. So and so thinks that they are worshiping God correctly, but they aren’t and they never take the time to verify that they are worshiping God correctly. Therefore, God is going to honor their choice and send them to hell. Or, this person has chosen to not believe in God or to reject God, and so God is honoring their choice and sending them to hell.
TW Corporal punishment
It was the exact same rhetoric I saw used to excuse the corporal punishment of children. It was framed as a choice. You can obey or I will hit you and if you don’t obey, then you have consented to me hitting you because I’m just honoring the choice that you made. You chose punishment, knowingly, so fine, I’ll punish you. That still seems like coercive control to me and abusive rhetoric.
If a spouse said hey, I told you to clean the kitchen and you didn’t and you knew what would happen so now I’m going to honor the choice that you made and beat you, we would consider that abuse but funnily enough nobody applies that same rhetoric to children. That’s an aside, but I wanted to point that out because I don’t want people to dismiss my point by saying well yeah but it’s kids so it’s different. No it’s not. Assault is still assault.
I suppose framing it as a choice could be helpful, but given the way I’ve seen that argument used, I still think it makes God out to be an abuser. If your options are comply or be tortured for noncompliance, I don’t see how that’s any better than you don’t even have the option I’m just going to torture you.
What an interesting read. It felt (to me) like following Divine breadcrumbs. And it feels delightful to me whenever I hear (or read about) someone else recognizing change happening. It's like reality opening so we can see more than we even knew we were capable. It also feels to me like whatever was covering my/our eyes falls away bit by bit so that we see more clearly. And I feel like this is true for the heart too that whatever has covered my/our heart from past experiences can drop away so we feel more love in ways we never knew was possible -- as Love Itself loving through me/us.
I freely admit, I had to look up who Lee Welch is because I loved the quote you shared of his. It feels like he speaks my language (LOL) or I speak his?
Like everything else I have,
somebody showed it to me,
and I found it all by myself.