Raising Hell: Christianity's Most Controversial Doctrine Put Under Fire

by Julie Ferwerda

I’ll tell you why we must question the teaching of hell. The very name, character, and purposes of God are at stake!

I believe Jesus’ true message, as we’ll fully explore, was that He came to save all people with the assistance of a chosen people, in a purposeful plan that extends long past this mortal lifetime. Jesus died for ALL (1 Peter 3:18), and His Father’s unrelenting will that “none should perish” prevails in the end (2 Peter 3:9).

It is not the same as the New Age belief that there are “many ways to God,” or that living a life of sin is of no consequence.

Universal Reconciliation is the belief that all people for all time will eventually be reconciled to God—that this lifetime is not the “only chance” to be saved—but that there is only one way to God, through Jesus Christ.

What child in the world would ever believe (without adult influence) that a loving parent would create a fearful place of torment, and then endlessly abandon most of his or her children there, punishing them for a limited duration of unbelief or rebellion, or for choices made from ignorance, distortions, deceptions, or bad influences? My educated, reasoned belief is zero.

I wrote this book to share my journey of learning and discovery. My journey didn’t just leave me cautiously hopeful, but proved to me that the doctrine of hell is nothing more than a human invention—a “tradition of men.”

Ah, many things this tale might teach— But I am not ordained to preach.

Did you see that? Before the young man could utter a word of remorse, before he had a chance to admit what a screw-up he’d been, the father had been scanning the distant horizon for his son’s form and ran to meet him with open arms.

In the parable of the lost sheep, it is the shepherd who goes searching for his missing sheep. He does not wait for the animal to find its way home; he searches it out, puts it on his shoulders, and carries it back to the flock. Similarly the woman from the parable of the lost coin searches by lamplight for her missing coin. She does not wait to happen upon it, or consider it hopelessly lost unless fate brings it to her.

“All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; But the LORD has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him” (Isaiah 53:6).

We have all been qualified as ungodly, helpless sinners and path-missers who wandered off the right path, following our own way. Yet isn’t this exactly who Paul says Jesus died for? Was His death for most in vain?

When you question any loving Christian, they will admit that they desire for everyone to be saved and they cannot truly make sense of the alternative.

Is this true? If not, why not?

If we are free to ask questions like a child,

She couldn’t accept the seeming contradiction of God’s character that professed unconditional, sacrificial love for all people on one hand, but on the other hand declared an end to that love as soon as a person died without professing faith in Jesus Christ.

She couldn’t accept the injustice that billions of people would be punished and separated from God eternally because of a limited period of rebellion or unbelief during their mortal lives, especially when most of those people had no way of knowing about or entering into a relationship with Jesus or the Christian God.

In short, I have always believed in hell (eternal torment and separation from God) as the “due punishment” for those who do not accept Jesus as Savior in this mortal lifetime, regardless of when and where they were born, and whether or not they ever heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

What if the good news isn’t so much about escape from punishment as it is rescue from death?

Surely this doesn’t mean that errors dominate the Scriptures, or that truth isn’t there to be found, or that we need to throw out everything we’ve held to. But what I have realized is that getting to the fuller, truer picture of the Scriptures is going take a lot more thoughtful and personal study—more digging and searching—than most of us have ever done before, and it’s going to be a lot like searching for buried treasure.

If you believe you have the truth, you shouldn’t be afraid to read or question anything—let the truth defend itself.

We found many more satisfying answers, in fact, than our old belief system offered; not just answers about hell, but about God’s largely unrecognized and forgotten plan for humanity taught from Genesis to Revelation.

The goal of this life, and ultimately the sacrifice of our Savior, is so much more profound than just living in preparation for an eternal vacation in the cosmos.

If we are going to give equal weight to all passages and not disregard the ones that don’t fit in with our orthodox belief system, a lot more people must actually be going to hell than those we just mentioned.

Hmmm. You have to admit, it’s kind of upsetting to find out that Jesus actually hid the truth about how to stay out of hell from the crowds—crowds who got the chance to hear from the “Savior” himself.

If you look into it, Jesus never even spoke to the crowds about “hell” (that we read about), only privately and in smaller contexts to His disciples and the Pharisees—religious people—and only, at the most, on three or four unique occasions.

However, the thought has always seemed pretty weird to me that God would go to the trouble of creating billions of people in His image, knowing ahead of time that He would endlessly reject and torture them. Not only does it fail to correspond with the forgiving and loving nature of God as revealed in Scripture, but also it sounds sort of Voodoo pin dollish.

But for the majority of Evangelical America, those who believe one’s “free will” decides their eternal fate (a.k.a. Arminianism), they’ve really dropped the ball in keeping as many people as possible out of hell.

We don’t seem to practically believe in hell.

Maybe we are sending people to hell by giving them a choice now, in a world where they have to choose by faith.

If they (and this should have been a question for my old hell-believing self as well) really believe that most of those people they know and care about—next door neighbors, “lost” family members, beloved friends, people of their community, and destitute multitudes of people like the 147 million orphans of this world—are going to a never-ending, terrifying, fiery hellhole of torture where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth,” why are they not out 24/7, sharing the love of Jesus with the lost multitudes…or at least trying out a few parables on them?

Why are they going about life as usual, attending soccer games, church socials, Super Bowl parties, luxury Christian cruises, shopping sprees, beach vacations, beauty appointments, and even expensive Holy Land tours?

See note above.

The next question I want answered is, for whom is it good news? In Luke 2:10 the angel says, “Do not be afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of great joy which will be for all the people…”

Have you ever wondered how the Gospel can be “good news” for all people if most people will not benefit from it?

I could not find one instance where it was used in the same context with hell or everlasting torment or even judgment—like the way we use it when we share the gospel today. In other words, the NT writers didn’t share it as “The good news or else! Turn or burn!”

This Scripture is clear on two things: God has set a day to judge the world in justice AND belief will be furnished to all humans.

Here’s my experience. If you even suggest to people these days that they should leave hell out of it when they share the Good News about Jesus with others (like Paul and Peter did), the first thing they ask is, “Well, if I leave out hell —what’s left? What do I tell people they’re being saved from?”

If hell is the most powerful motivating factor for getting people saved, then they are only being manipulated into something out of fear and coercion, not out of love and desire.

The purpose of heaven’s Good News is relationship with our Father through Christ, not fear of Him.

If God is love, and if there is no fear in love, how has the primary doctrine of the most widespread religion on our planet become all about fear? How could such a fearful place as hell truly exist?

As we’ll soon discover, understanding the true Gospel will release us from the frantic bondage of feeling like we only have X number of days during our mortal lives to save the world (even though most of us aren’t trying all that hard to do it anyhow).

👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

That should be pretty easy. For starters, hell isn’t even found in the Scriptures!

Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I’m pretty sure I know where you’re going, and I’m not against it. But it’s much more nuanced/complicated than that.

but is there any concrete evidence to support such a teaching as eternal torment or separation from God?

It’s all about definitions, that’s why the statement was an exaggeration.

KJV translates Sheol as hell whenever they want to convey it as the particular destination of the wicked. However, when portraying the fate of the righteous, they translate it grave. Hmmm.

There are essentially three different Greek words that translators inconsistently pick and choose to translate as “hell”—Hades, Gehenna, and Tartaroo, but not one conveys hell as we know it and teach it today.

Gehenna (or Gehinnom) is a literal valley near Jerusalem. In the OT Hebrew it was called, “the valley of Ben-Hinnom” or “Topheth.”

In this valley, some Israelite parents sacrificed their children in real fire to their false god Molech (Hebrew: “king”), an act that God referred to as “evil, detestable, and an abomination” (Jeremiah 7:30–31). Ironic, huh?

Ironic indeed

One should wonder why Jesus would refer to a literal valley that the Jews were familiar with just outside their city gates, and expect them to infer that it really meant a place of eternal torment.

At the very least, if Gehenna truly equates with the notion of hell, Bible translators should have been more consistent, using the word “hell” in the OT whenever the Valley of Ben Hinnom or Topheth occurs.

Gehenna, if it truly represents hell, is dangerously infrequent in the NT as a place to describe where most of mankind is headed. If people are only given one chance in this mortal lifetime to get it right, shoul...

it was the Pharisees who best weathered Roman occupation, and their belief in Zoroaster’s heaven and hell was passed on to both Christianity and Islam.

but for now, giving the benefit of the doubt to hell proponents, it is significant to me there are only ten potential references to everlasting destruction (in addition to the four occasions Jesus spoke of Gehenna) in twenty-seven books of the latest and reportedly most authoritative message from God to humans.

Even if, by some stretch, Paul did mean to convey everlasting fiery hell in this passage, don’t you think it’s unconscionable that, as the NT’s most prolific writer, he would only mention it once in all his writings? And that he wouldn’t take the opportunity to elaborate on it to anyone?

The advocacy of hell came primarily on the scene with Augustine: In no other respect did Augustine differ more widely from Origen and the Alexandrians [Eastern Church] than in his intolerant spirit. Even Tertullian conceded to all the right of opinion.