For many people, hell is where the conversation ends. How can a God called loving let anyone suffer for ever? The philosopher Bertrand Russell put it bluntly in a 1927 lecture: “I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.” Plenty of believers have felt the same.
Listen to the traditions talk among themselves, though, and you hear something unexpected. Rabbis limited Gehinnom to a year. A pope described hell as a state people choose, not a torture God imposes. A hadith says God wrote, in a book kept with Him, that His mercy overcomes His anger. Hindu and Buddhist teachers describe hells that end. And people of every faith still insist that justice must mean something. Here is the case for judgement, the case for mercy, and the honest disagreement in between.
“What concern hath Allah for your punishment if ye are thankful (for His mercies) and believe (in Him)? Allah was ever Responsive, Aware.”
Qur’an 4:147 · Pickthall (1930)
This verse sits in a long chapter of law and warning, and stops to ask a question. God gains nothing from anyone’s punishment. The verse ties judgement to thanks: the word for “appreciative”, shakir, shares its root with ash-Shakur, one of the 99 Names, the One who rewards even small gratitude.
Why justice matters to us at all
Psychologists find that a sense of fairness starts very early. In a 2007 study, babies of six and ten months, shown a puppet show, mostly reached for the character who helped rather than the one who hindered. In a 2015 study, many six-year-olds gave up their own sweets to stop another child getting away with being selfish. Across cultures, people want wrongdoing answered, even when it costs them.
That instinct is one reason the idea of a final judgement has lasted so long. Many people who suffered great wrongs, and never saw justice, have found it unbearable to think that cruelty simply wins. Thinkers on every side agree that a world where torturers and their victims end up exactly the same would not be fair. The real argument is about what judgement looks like, not whether wrong matters.
Most traditions also say that their pictures of fire and darkness are pictures. Scholars have long debated how literally to read them. What they agree on is that something real is at stake: we become what we choose.
What each faith says
Judaism
“The judgment of the wicked in gehinom [continues] twelve months.”
Mishnah Eduyot 2:10 · Mishnah Yomit, Dr Joshua Kulp (CC BY), via Sefaria
The Hebrew Bible says little about life after death. Its word for the place of the dead, Sheol, is a shadowy pit for everyone. Gehinnom was a real valley outside Jerusalem, remembered for terrible deeds. Later its name came to mean a place where souls are purified after death.
The rabbis put a limit on it: twelve months for the wicked. That is why many Jews say the Kaddish prayer for a parent for only eleven months. To say it for twelve would suggest the parent needed the full term. The Mishnah teaches that “all Israel have a share in the world to come” (Sanhedrin 10:1), and the rabbis extended that hope to the righteous of every nation (Tosefta Sanhedrin 13:2). Judgement is real, but it is shaped to heal.
Christianity
“The Lord is not slow concerning his promise, as some count slowness; but he is patient with us, not wishing that anyone should perish, but that all should come to repentance.”
2 Peter 3:9 · World English Bible (British Edition), public domain
Jesus spoke about Gehenna more than anyone else in the New Testament, and Christians take his warnings seriously (Matthew 25:46). Over the centuries three main views have grown. The traditional view holds that hell is final separation from God. Many teachers stress that it is chosen, not imposed. Pope John Paul II said in 1999 that hell is “not a punishment imposed externally by God”, but the state of those who “freely and definitively separate themselves from God”. C. S. Lewis wrote that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.
A second view, annihilationism, holds that the lost simply cease to exist. The evangelical leader John Stott leaned towards it, and a Church of England Doctrine Commission report in 1996 spoke of hell as possibly “total non-being”. A third view, universalism, hopes that in the end God’s love wins everyone back. Origen and Gregory of Nyssa held versions of it in the early church. The Orthodox writer David Bentley Hart argued for it in That All Shall Be Saved (2019). All three sides quote scripture, including the verse below.
Islam
“When God created creation, He wrote in His Book, which is with Him above the Throne: “My mercy overcomes My anger.”
Sahih al-Bukhari 7404 · our rendering
The Qur’an describes the Fire, Jahannam, in vivid terms, and Muslims believe the judgement is real. But mercy frames it. Every chapter but one opens “In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate”. God tells Moses, “My mercy embraceth all things” (7:156, Pickthall). A hadith says God divided mercy into a hundred parts and sent one part to earth. From that one part, a mare lifts her hoof so as not to hurt her foal (Bukhari 6000).
Muslims believe that anyone with even an atom’s weight of faith will in the end be brought out of the Fire (Bukhari 44), so for many believers it is a place of cleansing as well as punishment. Most scholars hold that for those who knowingly rejected God, it lasts. The fourteenth-century scholar Ibn al-Qayyim explored whether even that Fire might one day end, though most scholars disagreed. The Qur’an adds that no one carries another’s burden, and that God never punishes a people before a messenger has come to them (17:15).
Without religion
Humanists reject hell outright, and many say it is the teaching that most turned them away from religion. Russell called it “a doctrine of cruelty”. A short life, they argue, cannot deserve endless punishment, and a threat cannot make anyone truly good. Humanists put their weight on justice in this life: fair courts, truth-telling and remembering victims. Many believers agree that a faith run on fear has gone wrong, and quote the New Testament: “perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18).
Sikhi
Sikh scripture speaks of narak, hell, and surag, heaven, but the Gurus often turn them inward. The real hell, many Sikhs say, is haumai, ego, which cuts a person off from God here and now. The aim is not to reach a heaven but to merge with God and end the round of birth and death. Guru Nanak’s Japji teaches that we reap what we sow, and that God’s grace, nadar, can still lift anyone.
Hindu traditions
Hindu texts describe many narakas, or hells, but none of them lasts for ever. They are stages in a long journey of rebirth shaped by karma, the law that actions bear fruit. A soul passes through and moves on. The final goal is moksha, release. Many Hindu teachers see karma less as God’s anger than as the way a moral universe works, like a harvest that follows its seed.
Beyond the Abrahamic faiths
“All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage.”
Dhammapada 1 · F. Max Müller (1881), public domain
Buddhists also describe hell realms, and they too are temporary. No judge sends the pain; it follows from what we do, as the opening verse of the Dhammapada says below. The Bahá’í writings describe heaven and hell less as places than as nearness to God and distance from Him.
Same and different
Every tradition here says that what we do matters beyond this life, and that wrongdoing does not simply vanish. They differ on how: a year of cleansing, a lasting separation, an ending, a long cycle of rebirth, or reunion with God at last. The Abrahamic faiths share something sceptics often miss. They put mercy first. Ezekiel’s God takes no pleasure in anyone’s death. The New Testament says God wants everyone to be saved. The Qur’an’s God asks why He should punish the grateful. A sceptic replies that if mercy really came first, the threat would not be there at all. A believer replies that a judge who never judged would not be merciful, only indifferent. In every one of these faiths the door is left open for anyone who turns back.
A moment to reflect
- Why do you think even small children want cheating to be punished?
- Is there a difference between punishment that heals and punishment that only hurts?
- C. S. Lewis said the doors of hell are locked on the inside. What do you think he meant?
- The Qur’an asks why God would punish the grateful. How might thankfulness change a person?
Do it together
Write “mercy” and “justice” on two cards. Read the quotations on this page and place each one nearer one card or the other. Talk about which ones refused to choose.
Read the hadith of the mare and her foal. Then each person names one act of mercy they saw in an animal or a person this week.
Give small groups the traditional, annihilationist, universalist and karma views. Each group makes the best case for its view in two minutes, then names its biggest weakness.
Go deeper
- Pope John Paul II, general audience, 28 July 1999 (Vatican) · article
- Mishnah Eduyot 2:10 (Sefaria) · scripture
- Sahih al-Bukhari 7404 (sunnah.com) · scripture
- Why is Kaddish said for 11 months? (Chabad.org) · article
- Annihilationism (Wikipedia) · article
- Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian (1927) · article
Sources (14)
- Russell: “profoundly humane”; “a doctrine of cruelty”: Why I Am Not a Christian (1927), text at Drew University
- Mishnah Eduyot 2:10 (twelve months): Sefaria, Mishnah Yomit by Dr Joshua Kulp, CC BY
- Kaddish for eleven months and why: Chabad.org, citing Rama, Yoreh De’ah 376:4
- Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1 “all Israel have a share”: Sefaria
- John Paul II on hell as a state, not imposed externally: Vatican, general audience 28 July 1999
- Church of England Doctrine Commission (The Mystery of Salvation): hell as possibly “total non-being”: Anglican News, February 1996
- Stott, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Hart: Wikipedia, Annihilationism; Christian universalism
- 2 Peter 3:9, Matthew 25:46, 1 John 4:18: WEB (British Edition) via bible-api.com
- Bukhari 7404 (mercy overcomes anger), 6000 (hundred parts), 44 (atom’s weight of faith): sunnah.com
- Qur’an 4:147, 7:156, 17:15 (Pickthall (1930) where quoted): Quran.com
- Ibn al-Qayyim on the duration of the Fire: Jon Hoover, “Islamic universalism”, Muslim World 99 (2009)
- Dhammapada 1: Müller translation, Project Gutenberg
- Hindu and Buddhist narakas are temporary: Wikipedia, Naraka
- Infants prefer helpers (Hamlin, Wynn and Bloom 2007); six-year-olds pay to punish selfishness (McAuliffe, Jordan and Warneken 2015): Nature 450 (2007); Cognition 134 (2015)
