A few years ago I wrote a post on my views about hell. It was written–you’ll pardon the pun–in the heat of the moment, but nearly 4 years on I still hold to the basic points. Nonetheless, here is an addendum to the piece: I believe hell exists as a path people can go down.

Now, that does not mean that I disagree with Karl Barth when he says that the event of Jesus of Nazareth was so cosmic, so final, so extensive, so resounding, so loving, that ultimately it can exclude no one. Call me a buttercup, but I still believe that. And not only is it a belief, it is a guiding belief.

Yet humans can enter, for a time, a Gollum-like existence in which their humanity is scarcely recognisable. When we gnash our teeth in the outer darkness of un-humanness, it is a serious and ghastly state of affairs, whether it lasts for a minute or a million years.

As the ECT crowd is wont to point out, Jesus says a (helluva) lot about hell. Interestingly though, the inhabitants of hell in his telling are religious and respectable. They are the rich (Matthew 25). They are bitter, joyless hypocrites pretending to be religious teachers (Matthew 23:33), though he does also address unrepentant, unbelieving sinners in general (Mark 9:43; Matthew 10:28).

One final point. Because there are already four discrete terms for hell within the canon of Scripture (see my original post), perhaps in the spirit of the tradition, we could keep experimenting with the language around the concept. Think, for instance, of the phrase, “Their humanity is dying within them,” as opposed, “He’s going to hell.” This would broaden the category, in faithfulness to Jesus, to include respectable people.

Living in an extended state of diminishing humanity is terrifying, whether that comes through worship of money, technology, reputation, or whatever else–more terrifying perhaps than the most vivid medieval depictions of a literal fire.