Erasing Hell: What God Said about Eternity, and the Things We Made Up

by Francis Chan

I would love to erase hell from the pages of Scripture.

If I say there is no hell, and it turns out that there is a hell, I may lead people into the very place I convinced them did not exist!

I’ll admit that I have a tendency to read into Scripture what I want to find—maybe

Don’t believe something just because you want to, and don’t embrace an idea just because you’ve always believed it. Believe what is biblical. Test all your assumptions against the precious words God gave us in the Bible.

I’ve learned to be okay with saying, “I think I was off on that one.” While this is humbling and difficult, it’s better than continuing to believe something that is inaccurate.

I now speak against this idea of simply praying a prayer as fire insurance—I just don’t see it anywhere in Scripture.

to be focused on active discipleship, mission, and the pursuit of unity.

Let’s be eager to leave what is familiar for what is true. Nothing outside of God and His truth should be sacred to us.

Hell should not be studied without tearful prayer.

It’s a book about embracing a God who isn’t always easy to understand, and whose ways are far beyond us; a God whose thoughts are much higher than our thoughts; a God who, as the sovereign Creator and Sustainer of all things, has every right to do, as the psalmist says, “whatever He pleases” (Ps. 115:3 NASB).

God tells us plainly that His ways and thoughts are infinitely higher than ours (Isa. 55:9).

Expect then, that Scripture will say things that don’t agree with your natural way of thinking.

according to my sense of justice.

The most famous proponent of Universalism was an early church leader named Origen (ca. AD 185–254),

Origen’s beliefs were later deemed heretical,3

for over 1,600 years, hardly any major theologians argued that everyone will be saved. This all began to change in the 1800s, when several thinkers resurrected Origen’s beliefs and put them back on the table.

Bell suggests that every single person will embrace Jesus—if not in this life, then certainly in the next.5

The term Universalist is about as specific as the term Baptist.

If you call someone a Baptist, all you’ve said is that they don’t baptize babies—beyond this, it’s pretty much up for grabs.

all Universalists believe that everyone will end up being saved, but this belief is expre...

Philippians 2, 1 Corinthians 15, 1 Timothy 2, and Revelation 21.

In Philippians 3:19, Paul refers to the enemies of Christ whose “end is destruction,”

(note the word end in 3:19), which follow the decisions they make in this life.

Paul in Philippians 2 is actually quoting from the Old Testament book of Isaiah. Here, the prophet Isaiah looks forward to a time when every knee will bow and every tongue will confess the name of God (45:23).

in that passage, Isaiah is referring to God’s salvation, which is witnessed among the nations and ...

“all” doesn’t mean every single person. And this is a good thing to keep in mind when looking at 1 Corinthians 15:22 and other passages like it. You’ve got to figure out from the context what “all” means. For instance, when Mark said that “all the country of Judea” and “all the people of Jerusalem” were going out to be baptized by John (Mark 1:5 NASB), he certainly didn’t mean every single individual in Judea—man,

God’s moral will and His decreed will.

God’s desire—His moral will—is resisted.

And then there’s God’s decreed will. This refers to those things that God makes happen regardless of what humans decide.

There’s a difference, in other words, between God’s values that please Him (moral will) and those events that He causes to happen (decreed will).

which was against God’s moral will (Judg. 3:1–6). And yet Judges 14:4 says that his love affair was “from the LORD.”

He used Samson’s lust to oppose the Philistines.

Samson was free to go against God’s moral will, yet God intervened to carry out His decreed will in using this situation to fight against the Philistines.

The gospel has broken down all ethnic and socioeconomic barriers through the cross of Jesus Christ, as Paul says

No passage in the Bible says that there will be a second chance after death to turn to Jesus.

One Christian Universalist admits this. Arguing for the possibility of people getting out of hell, he says: Clearly my interpretation is underdetermined by the texts.… I am not so much exegeting the texts as trying to draw out the logic of New Testament theology as I understand it and its implications for those texts. In the process I may be offering ways of reading the texts that go beyond what their authors had in mind.20

The Bible does not say that there will be a second chance after death.

This passage “gives no hint whatever that the door will remain permanently open.”

see Mark S. M. Scott, “Guarding the Mysteries of Salvation: The Pastoral Pedagogy of Origen’s Universalism,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 18.3 (2010): 347–68; Tom Greggs, “Exclusivist or Universalist? Origen the ‘Wise Steward of the Word’ (CommRom. V.1.7) and the Issue of Genre,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 9.3 (2007): 315–327.

Origen’s views were deemed heretical at the fifth ecumenical church council held at Constantinople in AD 553.

Bell certainly presents this view as the good view and the traditional view of hell as the bad view. See Love Wins

worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh” (66:23–24).

there will be many among the nations (i.e., Gentiles) who will embrace this God of Israel. This is an important theme in Isaiah as well (44:5; 45:14, 20– 25; 49:7; 55:5).

The Greek word for “will” is thelema, which is the noun form of the verb translated “want” in 1 Timothy 2:4 (NIV).

See also Matthew 25:1–12; Hebrews 9:27; Revelation 22:11.

we all have a tendency to recreate Jesus in our own image. Before we know it, we have an American Jesus, a Western Jesus, a postmodern Jesus, a hippie Jesus, or a capitalistic or socialistic Jesus. Deep down in the heart of every person is a hidden desire to reinterpret Jesus in light of our own culture, political bent, or favorite theological belief. We do the same thing with hell.

For Origen, hell was a place where the souls of the wicked were purified so they could find their way back to God.

Really?? Aka a purgarory?

Jesus probably didn’t have long hair because this wasn’t typical of Jewish men of His day,

so ingrained was the belief in hell among first-century Jews5 that Jesus would have had to go out of His way to distance Himself from these beliefs if He didn’t hold them.

Jewish writers to see what they say about hell.6