“avoiding the profane and idle babblings and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge” (1 Tim 6:20, NKJV)
We are never allowed to use “silly stories that get dressed up as religion” (1 Tim 4:7, Msg) to inform our concepts of heaven and hell, we concluded in the last teaching, only the Bible. Unfortunately a very large part of our understanding of the invisible realm (which also includes the “invisible God” – Col 1:15; 1 Tim 1:17) is based on tradition.
Before we have a look at what the Bible has to say about hell, it is important to quickly examine the trajectory of thoughts about hell across the ages.
The historian Polibius (200-118 BC) suggested the following centuries ago: “Since the multitude is ever fickle, full of lawless desires, irrational passions and violence, there is no other way to keep them in order but by the fear and terror of the invisible world; on which account our ancestors seem to me to have acted judiciously, when they contrived to bring into the popular belief these notions of the gods, and of the infernal regions.”
In the same spirit one finds the words of Titus Livius (59 BC – 17 AD), who praises the wisdom of Numa, as he has managed to invoke fear of God/gods in people through “a most efficacious means of governing an ignorant and barbarous populace”.
Around the same time Strabo has the following to say (63/64 BC – 24 AD): “The multitude are restrained from vice by the punishments the gods are said to inflict upon offenders, and by those terrors and threatenings which certain dreadful words and monstrous forms imprint upon their minds … For it is impossible to govern the crowd of women, and all the common rabble, by philosophical reasoning, and lead them to piety, holiness and virtue – but this must be done by superstition, or the fear of the gods, by means of fables and wonders; for the thunder, the aegis, the trident, the torches (of the Furies), the dragons, &c., are all fables, as is also all the ancient theology.”
Timaeus of Locrus (5th Century AD), continues, after he dogmatically theorised about the importance of the community having certain rewards and punishments after death: “For as we sometimes cure the body with unwholesome remedies, when such as are most wholesome produce no effect, so we restrain those minds with false relations, which will not be persuaded by the truth. There is a necessity, therefore, of instilling the dread of those foreign torments: as that the soul changes its habitation; that the coward is ignominiously thrust into the body of a woman; the murderer imprisoned within the form of a savage beast; the vain and inconstant changed into birds, and the slothful and ignorant into fishes.”
Seneca (1 BC – 65 AD), the Roman philosopher, one of Jesus’ contemporaries, pointed out how hell had been the product of poets’ imaginations: “Those things which make the infernal regions terrible, the darkness, the prison, the river of flaming fire, the judgment seat, &c., are all a fable, with which the poets amuse themselves, and by them agitate us with vain terrors.” Sextus Empiricus (160-210 AD) calls it “poetic fables of hell”. The greatest of these was the Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy. His mythologising of hell is the one single instance of imaginative illusion which has played the most important part in establishing Christianity’s construct of hell.
- Selah: In the light of this, what do you believe does the Old Testament say about hell?
- Read: Matt 16-18
- Examine the OT-typology: Matt 16:4 (Tip: The book Jonah)
- Read: Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy.
