Love Wins: Chapter Three "Hell"

In Chapter 3, Rob Bell moves on to consider Hell. He begins by clearing the ground. Again, he goes back to the Bible and recounts all the references to hell, taking the notion from all the meanings that have been built up in countless conversations and teachings. What does the Bible tell us about hell? There isn't much there. There is no real Old Testament equivalent. Sheol comes the closest, but that is simply a shadowy place of the dead.  When we move to the New Testament, we find all but one reference to hell comes from Jesus. The word that is translated as hell refers to a literal garbage dump which had a perennial fire, just outside of Jerusalem.  Two other words are sometimes translated as Hell. One appears on 2 Peter and the other is Hades, which is  a Greek term  used as the translation of the Old Testament  word Sheol. What we are to take from this is that there is not a lot of clear, consistent, Biblical understanding of hell for us to deal with.

Is hell an outdated concept? Bell turns from the Bible to the contemporary world. He recalls situations of hell on earth, concluding that hell is not metaphorical, it is real. Sin and hell are extreme words for extreme situations.

Bell returns to Scripture to dig into the story of the rich man and Lazarus in order to begin reconstructing what the Bible is teaching about hell.  He connects this story to our knowledge of social relationships and the attitudes of our hearts.  He reminds us of how this story would sound to Jesus' original listeners. What kind of warning would they have taken from it? What kind of warning should we take from it?   Here are a few key sentences from page 79: "What we see in Jesus's story about the rich man and Lazarus is an affirmation that there are all kinds of hell, because there are all kinds of ways to resist and reject all that is good and true and beautiful and human now, in this life, and so we can only assume we can do the same in the next." he goes on to say, "There are individual hells, and communal, society-wide hells, and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously.  There is hell now, and there is hell later, and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously."

Bell points out that Jesus preaching - about hell and almost everything else - was directed toward those who considered themselves on the inside. He was warning them that their hard hearts were putting them at risk. Jesus ws pointing out that what was important was being the kind of people who were all about showing the world what God's love looks like in real life.

The final point I will lift up from this chapter is that Bell argues that punishment as described in the Bible is temporary and redemptive. It is not "cast off forever." It is punished with the intention of restoration.  Bell wants to keep the word hell: "We need a word that refers to the big, wide, terrible evil that comes from the secrets hidden deep within our hearts all the way to the massive, society-wide collapse and chaos that comes when we fail to live in God's world God's way."