Our understanding of Hell has been evolving for thousands of years … and we’re the ones making all the changes!

Dr. Meghan Henning (Associate Professor of Christian Origins; University of Dayton, OH) gives a scholar’s view on the historical evolution of JudeoChristian thinking about this … “place?” … state? …. concept?

For thousands of years,the ancient Hebrew  — people like Abraham and Sarah — thought that everyone who died went to Sheol … a dry, dark, and dismal place that was more like a memory than an existence. They had no concept of a final judgment, no places of reward or punishment. No Heaven, or going to be with God. Sheol could even be experienced while one was still biologically alive! One could choose the way of life or the way of death (by following or rejecting the Law of God), and the outcome of that choice would even affect the quality of one’s life experiences.

For the next couple thousand years, the Hebrews began to develop ideas that were emerging in the cultural zeitgeist. Ideas that might have started with the Egyptians, the Zoroastrians, the Assyrians, and Babylonians. Now, the idea of reward and/or punishment in the afterlife was coming into view, although this was more directed at certain groups or categories of people (especially royalty, military leaders, and heroes). The average person couldn’t really expect too much.

Then Greek thinking changed everything, including everyone’s understanding of the soul and the afterlife. Both were eternal, and applied to everybody, including commoners.

But we’re still a long way off from the Lake of Fire and eternal conscious torment. It was only when the early Christian church flexed its muscles that we see the kind of hell that Dante immortalized in his painting, and that we picture today.

Clearly, the concept of “Hell” has evolved … and done so at our hands.

Here are three of the best quotes that Meghan gave us:

• “We have a number of depictions of afterlife spaces in Greek and Roman tradition … Hades is a place that you can visit. You can go on a tour. And that idea of being able to tour Hades has a profound influence on ancient Jewish apocalyptic thought, and on early Christian apocalyptic thought.”

• “People often ask me: ‘Does Hell exist?’ and the first response that I give is there’s no way to know. That’s just not something we can know because that’s not the question that these texts are asking.”

• “Be very careful about assuming that human beings can adequately determine a divine system of justice without bringing to it all of our ideas of fairness that are part of our own social contexts. As a group, Christians don’t have a great track record with that. For 2000 years, we have been defining as ‘theologically fair’ Roman systems of torture.”
  

As always, tell us what you think…

Find more about Dr. Henning at https://udayton.academia.edu/MeghanHenning.

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