Hell is for the Rich and the Mighty

On Universalism and Social Justice

In honor and memory of Martin Luther King, Jr.

To be clear, I am a universalist. I have not billed this as a “universalist” newsletter: if anything, my chosen schtick has been deliberately open-ended to allow for any and everything I might or will take interest in. What’s more, if you’re into universalism, the people you need to go read or listen to anyway are Origen of Alexandria (in Behr’s translation), St. Gregory Nyssen, and St. Maximos the Confessor,¹ and among contemporary writers (preeminently) David Bentley Hart, Ilaria Ramelli,² Robin Parry, and David Artman (among whom, for my part, Hart has made the most decisive argument). Part of the reason this newsletter is not devoted to the topic is because I feel I have little to add that has not been covered by these figures, and so what I am about to say largely rehashes what they have laid out on the topic.

There are three sets of questions involved in the question of the ultimate fate of the wicked and the final resolution of God’s justice and mercy that is universalism: the philological question of whether scriptural texts speak of something called “eternal hell,” the hermeneutical question of how to read diverse scriptural texts as a common witness, and the philosophical or theological question of what to do with scripture in relation to reason, anyway. On the first question, Jewish and Christian Scripture speak of an underworld—Sheol or Hades—that, in Early Jewish literature, is stratified to include places of relief and reparations on the one hand and punishment on the other (as in the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus); Jesus speaks often of Gehenna, the Valley of the Son of Hinnom outside of Jerusalem, which due to Early Jewish traditions and a few texts came to be thought of as a site of eschatological punishment and destruction for the wicked; and one text, 2 Pet 2:4, speaks of Tartaros in verbal form, as a kind of further subsection of the underworld reserved for rebellious angels. Hel is Old English with wide cognate purchase in the Germanic family of languages, and likewise means “underworld” where it first occurs. As to temporal duration, Hebrew has olam, meaning “age” or “world,” the plural of which is olamim; Greek has aion, which really just means “aeon” or “age,” of whatever duration, and the adjective derived from it, aionios. As several of the people listed above point out in their various works, the Greek word one would expect for something genuinely “eternal” in the sense of unending would be aidios, but this is never attached to any of the terms for underworld or to Gehenna or still yet to kolasis, the most common New Testament word for punishment. There is, that is to say, no lexical equivalent to the English “eternal hell.”

Textually, biblical literature envisions three kinds of scenarios for the wicked; the hermeneutical question is which one can receive, contain, and explain the others so as to render these diverse texts a real canon (which is admittedly already a theological rather than a historical interest). In the first scenario, the wicked are simply destroyed, whether by the avenger that is mortality, by some specialized experience of death, or sometimes by a bloody, violent, vicious with the warrior god YHWH on his fabled Day. In the second, the wicked are, whether in body or also in soul, imprisoned and tormented for their crimes against God and God’s world; few texts narrate something like this position. The third scenario is that, at the final horizon of the cosmic future, the wicked are reconciled to God in an act of universal salvation. Again, the hermeneutical question is which of these texts is capable of explaining well the others, and the clear answer is that the universalist texts alone are capable of bearing the weight of an annihilation (of a kind) for the wicked and of their cosmic imprisonment (the universalist spin being that this is for their rehabilitation). If the wicked are destroyed, they are neither imprisoned nor saved; if tormented forever, they are neither destroyed nor saved; only the third scenario makes sense of the other two.

The philosophical or theological question that stands at the end of the philological and hermeneutical quest is how to reconcile what Scripture says of God’s economy with the wicked with what reason exercised in philosophy says of God himself—that is, as the infinite ground of “being, consciousness, and bliss” (Sanskrit: सच्चिदानंद/satcittananda), God (ὁ θεός) rather than simply a god of whatever kind (θεός; ἄγγελος; δαίμων; etc.).³ What befits such a God, as immutable and infinite love? On the one hand, the metaphysics of annihilationism are fairly good from the classically theistic perspective: God is being itself, and goodness itself; moral defection from the good therefore leads to decline in, diminution, and finally loss of being. But if annihilationism is finally true, then God either compromises his own will for the sake of the creature’s (on a “soft” annihilationism) or revokes his own irrevocable gift of being to the creature, effectively changing his mind about whether he wills the creature at all.⁴ If infernalism is finally true, then in God’s ubiquitous filling of all things with himself which is the world’s ultimate destiny (1 Cor 15:28), God either fails to fill all things with himself or in filling all things with himself the evil of his creatures somehow fails to be purged, such that they remain evil while filled with God—implying that some part of God is evil, and that God’s evil creatures simply manifest that analogue in him as a key part of the theophanic character of creation. Conversely, if God, who is not evil but the Good himself, does purge them of their evil in coming to dwell in them, then their ongoing punishment would be arbitrary, since, their existence maintained and their evil exhausted, they would simply commune with God in his goodness and therefore enjoy divine beatitude. So universalism is the most metaphysically befitting God, just as it is also the most hermeneutically and textually clear eschatology.

Again, I believe all that, and if you need a more thorough argument, go read That All Shall Be Saved or any of the numerous summaries of the arguments of the book that Hart has done, especially over at Public Orthodoxy.⁵ Universalism has a number of important advantages as a doctrine, but one of them, I wager, is that it frees hell itself for the people hell is really meant for, by whom I mean, of course, the rich and the mighty.

Two points by way of clarification. First, it is worth pointing out that most of the historic advocates of universalism in the Early Church were themselves monastics following strictly ascetic ways of life and who did not see universalism as the grounds for compromising on moral theology, except perhaps for the most reprobate, ethically dense individuals in the catechumenate, laity, and clergy. For them, universalism was the fruitful vision of reality in the wake of the hard pruning of the soul to see past the ignorance that life in the flesh consists of, and the all-encompassing, merciful love for every being in its sufferings and conditionality that followed. In this respect, the universalist Fathers are more like Jain kevalins or Mahayana bodhisattvas or accomplished yogis than they are like many contemporary people who dismiss hell simply on the grounds that they find the whole concept of moral theology itself abominable. Universalism at its most unavoidable grows from a life of hard-won love and cultivated wisdom, though it is also lucidly obvious if one takes the time to think about it. But grown from this particular sanctity, the universalist Fathers no less believed that salvation for many if not most beings would come at the deep expense of purgative suffering, whether in this life or the next, to be free from the addictions to ignorance and sin that run amok in the world. Neither Origen nor Nyssen nor Evagrios nor Maximos nor Isaac of Nineveh thought that universal salvation equated to a kind of blanket sanction of all activity performed in this life, and they especially thought that punishment awaited those who spent their lives in desperate evil, particularly the wealthy and the powerful. Universalism frees hell to once more serve a purpose of meaningful moral pedagogy, both at the level of discourse and of the divine economy itself.

That said, it should also be said that, second, contemporary people have a bit of a point when they guffaw at the particular interests that moral theologians take in the lives and habits of everyday people, especially around matters regarding sex, gender, and marriage. To paraphrase Met. Kallistos Ware, churches stooping down to look through the keyhole into the bedroom is a bit of a compromising position to be seen in: but it is unfortunately one that modern Christianities are seen in all the time.⁶ The threat of hell is most ubiquitously leveled at people who, more or less, fail the moral calculus of life: in certain forms of Latin-rite Catholicism, for example, this happens because they have not mastered and applied a number of arcane Latin concepts to their every decision—or at least to their every conscious decision—and then dutifully made it to confession to be absolved from the soul-death they have incurred and that would indubitably damn them to an eternity apart from God should they not rectify it in time. Morality and ethics are, on this view of the world, obviously clear, straightforward, simply understood and applied; the world is black-and-white, and so appropriate behaviors and responses are cut-and-paste, fill-in-the-blank affairs. Hell is full on this reading because most people simply don’t follow the rules.

Yet anyone who has spent any amount of time in the contemporary world, with its overlapping complexities, numerous existential crises, and nested dependencies and ethical compromises would know firsthand that making a straightforwardly, simply, and unimpeachably good decision in 2022 is often extremely difficult.⁷ The situation is made all the more beguiling when one tries to project morality onto the political arena, and to seek to adjudicate according to immutable spiritual standards the frank savagery that is and has been the political scene for most humans on earth for most of human history. There is something ironic and troubling about the fact that moral theologians Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant alike are regularly up-in-arms over pet issues against Christian politicians whose faith they hold in question, without recognizing that their own churches venerate people more obviously and flagrantly disobedient to historic Christian norms around morality as deified saints. And the issues that Christians wield the threat of hell against politically are somehow never the ones that biblical literature itself most often evokes the threat of divine punishment against: somehow, in America especially, moral theologians seem distinctly uninterested in threatening people with wealth and power with hell, though those are the main people on the chopping block across the Early Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature most responsible for dominant Christian attitudes around the afterlife. After all, in Jewish and Christian Tradition, the aporetic character of much of the human experience is meant to engender in us attitudes of reverence, humility, and charity; those who act arrogantly and abusively from ignorance are one thing, but those who do so with some level of awareness ofw what they do are intentionally increasing hell on earth. Universalism is sensible because the truly just God would certainly be infinitely merciful to the moral frailty of humans as we live in our confusing world, including toward the real villains among us; but likewise, good universalism need not rob those who as far as they can intend to make life on earth hell for the rest of us of a taste of hell themselves.

If this is unclear, look back at the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Lk 16:19-31) again. This is the only time in the teachings of Jesus that anything like hell in the traditional sense of the term is treated⁸ and the only person who is in it is an unnamed rich man; the only people at threat of it are his unnamed, presumably rich family, about whom he is concerned. Lazarus is sent to Abraham’s “bosom” or “vale” (as Hart translates kolpos) for no other reason than because he is poor; this is explicitly why Abraham says he is now relieved from his sufferings while the rich man stands in flames (16:25). That is to say, the most traditional image of postmortem hell for the wicked only depicts a rich person that does nothing to care for the poor dead and in a fiery underworld, while postmortem relief is simply karmic justice for material poverty and suffering in this life to a named pauper. And this makes sense: this is after all Luke’s Jesus, whose Sermon on the Plain blesses “the poor” (Lk 6:20) rather than Matthew’s more apocalyptic (but still equivalent in meaning) “poor in spirit” (Matt 5:3), and who makes “Woe to you who are rich” a fundamental part of his public preaching (6:24), later remarking that it is excessively difficult for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God (18:24).

I do not wish to pretend as though this were the only relevant text, either to the threat of eschatological punishment or to the specific leveling of the same at the rich and the powerful. One can almost throw a stone in the New Testament and find passages with equivalent ideas. One of my personal favorites is in Revelation 6:

And I looked when he opened the sixth seal, and a great earthquake came about, and the sun became black as sackcloth, and the full moon became as blood, and the stars fell from heaven to the earth, as a fig tree throws its fruits shaken by a great wind, and the sky disappeared like a rolled book, and every mountain and island was moved from their places, and the kings of the earth and the great men and the chiliarchs and the rich and the mighty and every slave and freedman hid themselves in the caves and in the rocks of the mountains; and they say to the mountains and to the rocks: ‘Fall upon us and hide us from the face of the one sitting on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb, because the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?’” (Rev 6:12-17)

Notice how many different kinds of economic, social, and political prominence John highlights as especially the target of eschatological divine wrath. Sure, in Revelation, the divine wrath affects the entire world to some degree or another, but repeatedly, God’s human targets are fairly specific: the wealthy and powerful Romans who, on John’s view, collaborate with demons to create a culture based on coercion and exploitation of God’s world and people. And if one reads biblical literature attentively enough, that is really the kind of stuff God mostly seems to care about: mistreatment and exploitation of the weak by the strong, the poor by the rich, the genuine by the scheming.

Again, I am a universalist: I believe that at the final horizon, the rich man and Lazarus stand as fellow worshipers of the one God in harmony, that all those kings of the earth who hide from the wrath of God and the Lamb in the cavernous earth are also the same people who finally stream to the New Jerusalem in the New Heaven and New Earth (Rev 21:24). But I would not want to part ways with the threat of hell for the rich and the powerful. For one thing, as a universalist, I certainly believe with other universalists throughout the history of the Christian Tradition that final salvation for many if not most will involve some degree of purgation, and for the particularly wicked, that cleansing will be especially intense.⁹ For another, I believe God when he self-identifies with the poor, the marginalized, and the exploited (as in, say, the Magnificat; Lk 1:46-55), and I agree with the more Hellenized and apocalyptic Jews of antiquity that a world where the wicked are only punished by mortality is not a satisfying theodicy when righteous people suffer needlessly and the poor suffer endlessly. Universalism can, if not explained correctly, simply act as a mechanism for reinforcing systems of oppression of various kinds, from slavery to segregation to racism to massive wealth inequality to sexism to environmental destruction to war to autocracy. That is to say, God’s promise to save all is not a promise to save all that people believe themselves to be, or to be entitled to, and therefore not all that they have done in this life: to save the real person, the real hypostatic entity or being, is not a commitment to ransom the false selves that they have worn in this life, to their own dismay and often to those of others. What is left of Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot or whomever at the final end is so purged and healed by the fire of God that their continuity with their historical selves is difficult to imagine: whatever that person is once all their evil has been exhausted, confronted, repented of, atoned for, and healed in all its effects is beyond our best imagination for most of us. The real human being is rescued, but the horror, the nightmare that we are all capable of making ourselves into, is burned away forever; and so the summons to repentance remains our moral obligation in this life, for ourselves and for others.

But the people most at risk and therefore in need of that call are none other than those whose resources and rancor make hell real for others. For those people, what Jesus, the apostles, and the Christian Tradition have to preach are nothing other than the severe love of God: God’s love for the poor and the downtrodden, as their champion defender, and then his love for the oppressors themselves, whose salvation may well come only through the quarantining and annihilation of the false self to uncover the spark of genuine spiritual personhood within if they will not make radical, drastic changes to their lifeways. And just as the rich and the powerful have traditionally exploited hell as a weapon against the poor—just as have Christian clerics invested in a system where the rich and the powerful once rewarded them and where, today, many of them hope so desperately it shall do so again—hell can be a powerful weapon of rhetoric against the mighty, the ultimate promise of divine vengeance against the way that human evil exploits humans and non-humans alike. It is high time to normalize threatening politicians and billionaires with hellfire, to draw the conclusion simply and straightforwardly that the fruit of their inaction on behalf of the vulnerable, their withholding of the common good from the commons, their obstruction, gridlock, and conspiracy, is nothing other than true torment at the sight of the infinite divine beauty which they daily slander with their sins against their neighbor, even if they lay claim to the pretense of religious faith. In fact, this is especially the appropriate tactic for public figures whose pocketbooks, policies, and pulpits do not match their professed faith.

Universalism frees us to use hell this way because it also frees us from the burden of feeling as though we are giving up on whatever final ounce of redeemability Christianity instructs us to believe that every person still retains when we rage prophetically. Because whatever God truly creates is saved, we are free to consign to the fire all that God does not, which is to say, our own evil. To truly believe that God loves every human being, as only the universalist does, cannot and should not overwhelm our proper sense that in this fallen kosmos, God is perfectly happy to oppose his enemies; and thank God that his enemies are, really, the enemies of the human race.

1. Scholars debate this one, but I think my friend Jordan Daniel Wood has decisively clinched the argument that Maximos was a universalist with his forthcoming The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor (South Bend, IN: UND Press, 2022).

2. I will offer this caution with Ramelli, that she sometimes fudges the Greek of the texts she peruses in favor of universalism, and sometimes with drastic consequences for how the passage should be understood. That said, anything she has to say on the subject is still worlds ahead in terms of credibility of, say, Michael McClymond.

3. See generally David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

4. On this, see Bruce McCuskey, “The Interminable Conversation Versus Annihilationism,” ChurchLife Journal (2019).

5. Here, here, here, and here. See also Parts I and II of his short story “Non Compos.”

6. This is from his infamous (but should be famous) piece for The Wheel.

7. See Brett Sakeld, “How to Vaccinate Like a Catholic,” ChurchLife Journal (2020).

8. See Hart, “The Vale of Abraham,” PublicOrthodoxy (2018).

9. See Taylor Ross, “The Severity of Universal Salvation,” ChurchLife Journal (2019).