I want to raise something about Dr. Bart Ehrman’s What the Hell? course, which he presented on the Paths platform last Saturday. Not as a criticism of the historical scholarship, but out of concern about the scope of its conclusion and about what is left unsaid when a harmful picture of hell has been dismantled. The historical case was carefully made. On the account presented, Sheol is not hell. Gehenna is a valley, and the threat concerns a shameful fate for the corpse. The later doctrine of immortal souls undergoing eternal conscious torment is a development, not the teaching of the historical Jesus.

That distinction matters. Many people have spent years, sometimes their whole lives, terrified that a wrongly lived life, a mistaken belief or an unresolved doubt might lead to endless torture. To hear that Jesus did not teach such a thing can bring genuine relief. That relief is real, and I do not want to qualify it or take it away. But the historical reconstruction presented in the webinar still contains something severe.

On Bart’s own account, Jesus taught a coming judgment. Some enter the kingdom. Others are excluded and described as weeping and gnashing their teeth. As he explained it, they are deeply distressed because they have been shut out. They are then destroyed and never brought back. That is why the punishment is called eternal: not because the experience of pain continues endlessly, but because the loss is irreversible. Within that historical picture, then, there is judgment, exclusion, conscious distress and definitive loss. What is denied is the endless conscious torment of immortal souls. That is a narrower conclusion than “there is nothing to fear,” and it is the conclusion for which the historical evidence was presented.

The closing moved differently. It went from “this did not come from the Hebrew Bible,” to “this did not come from Jesus,” to “this is not the original form of Christianity,” to “it doesn’t make sense,” and finally to “it almost certainly is not true.” The first two are historical conclusions. The third is also historical as stated, but in the movement towards the final conclusion it begins to carry normative force, as though being original helps determine what is valid. The final two are philosophical judgments. They may be defensible, but they do not follow from the historical findings alone.

Several distinctions are folded together here:

No eternal torment is not the same as no judgment.
No immortal soul in hell is not the same as no consequence after death.
“This particular picture is almost certainly untrue” is not the same as “there is nothing to fear.”

This broader movement was visible during the evening itself. Within minutes of the first lecture ending, one participant asked: “If there is no hell doesn’t that negate the significance of the cross? Also what happens to the need for salvation?” Another wrote in the same interval: “if he is not saving me from hell, what am I missing?” These questions do not show that the lecture caused such conclusions, and they do not make Bart responsible for every inference that listeners bring with them. But they do show that the broader movement is alive: from no eternal torment to no hell, from no hell to no need for salvation, and from there to no intelligible significance for the cross. That is why the scope of the conclusion matters.

There is also a deeper question about what judgment is for. The lectures opened with a real moral and theological problem. Good people suffer. The wicked prosper. Victims die without vindication. Perpetrators sometimes die peacefully, honoured and unexposed. If death simply closes the account, the same silence receives the tortured child and the unrepentant torturer. Bart explained that this unresolved injustice helped give rise to Jewish apocalyptic hope. The expectation of resurrection and judgment was not merely a speculative interest in the geography of the afterlife. It was a protest against the thought that violence, lies, oppression and death might have the final word. That protest remains even when eternal torment is rejected.

A later solution has been dismantled, but the wound for which it was devised is still present. One participant put it before the lectures had even begun: if there is no hell, and perhaps no heaven, do we simply work for justice while knowing that there will be no ultimate justice? The question was still there at the end, and it was not taken up. I understand that Bart is a historian, he is not a Christian, and he does not owe anyone a theological answer. The issue is therefore not personal omission, but the composition of the evening. The lectures began by treating the longing for final justice as a serious human and historical force. They ended by giving reassurance about punishment without returning to the need for justice that had produced the expectation of judgment in the first place.

The distinction above is the reason I am writing this post. I would regret it if what follows caused that argument to disappear from view. Readers do not need to share my own theological convictions in order to consider the historical and methodological point I have made. Here I move beyond the historical question and speak as a Christian. Nothing that follows is a claim about what the sources establish, nor is it part of my argument about the way the webinar concluded. I offer it instead as a constructive possibility: not as evidence, but as a gift.

Judgment need not mean a divine torture chamber or an infinite multiplication of pain. It can mean that truth is finally spoken about every human life. That what was hidden is brought into the light. That victims are not forgotten. That power cannot eternally rename cruelty as virtue. That the hungry, the stranger, the sick and the imprisoned matter more than the reputations of those who passed them by.

In Jesus’ own judgment sayings, the question is rarely offered as information to detached spectators. He does not give us a map from which we can calmly calculate the destination of others. The question turns back on the hearer.

Did you feed the hungry?
Did you welcome the stranger?
Did you visit the sick and the imprisoned?

Read in that spirit, the question reaches further into our own lives. Did you make life possible for another person, or did your presence become a kind of hell for them?

That participant perspective matters. A doctrine of judgment becomes corrupt when it allows people to stand safely outside it, assigning others to punishment while assuming their own place among the blessed. The warning is addressed first to the person who hears it.

The deepest danger may therefore not be that somewhere beneath the earth there is a mechanism of endless torture. It may be that a human being can become so shaped by falsehood, indifference, domination and refusal of love that the light itself is experienced as exposure, truth as judgment and communion as something alien. If life is found in God, then separation from that life is not a minor penalty added from outside. It is death. If truth, light, bread, welcome and communion are made known in Christ, then their refusal has a recognisable negative form: falsehood, darkness, hunger, exclusion and isolation.

Those are not merely future possibilities. We know them already. We create them for one another. Every city has its places of abandonment. Every society has people who are treated as though they were already outside the gate. Every tradition, including the Christian tradition, has sometimes used the threat of hell to produce hell in the present. That is why relief from eternal torment should not become relief from moral seriousness.

The point of judgment is not to restore balance by reproducing suffering on an infinite scale. It is God’s active no to evil: the refusal to let cruelty, falsehood and exclusion stand as though they were finally harmless or inconsequential. Judgment means not only that the truth is spoken, but that evil is exposed, opposed and brought to an end. It is the refusal to say that suffering, injustice and destruction are ultimately meaningless, and the hope that death does not erase the distinction between the one who was crushed and the one who did the crushing.

Christian hope goes further than the expectation that wrongdoers will finally receive pain proportionate to the pain they caused. Its centre is not a perfected system of retribution, but the victory of life over death, truth over lies and communion over exclusion. The claim is not simply that there will be a final punishment. It is that evil will not remain sovereign, that victims will not be lost to oblivion and that destruction will not have the final word.

This also changes how one speaks of Christ. If Jesus is no longer understood primarily as the one who saves us from an eternal torture chamber, it does not follow that he has become religiously unnecessary. It may mean that salvation itself must be understood more deeply. Salvation is not merely rescue from something God would otherwise do to us. It is rescue from death, falsehood, estrangement, the power of evil and the human capacity to destroy both ourselves and one another. It is reconciliation, healing, resurrection and the restoration of life with God and neighbour.

The cross then does not protect us from a cruel God. It reveals God entering the place of abandonment, violence and godforsakenness. Resurrection is the declaration that even there, death does not win. This does not provide us with a complete description of the fate of every human being. Nor does it authorize us to identify the lost. The proper response to judgment is not confident speculation about others, but seriousness about ourselves, hope for every person and action on behalf of those whose lives are being made unbearable now.

My concern is therefore not that the historical argument should have been withheld. It is that the scope of its conclusion needed to remain as carefully defined as the argument itself. The webinar made a serious case against eternal conscious torment. It did not establish that there is no judgment, no irreversible loss, no final unveiling of truth and nothing after death that should concern us. The lectures brought real relief where relief is needed. But relief from the fear of endless torture need not leave us with nothing. It can clear the ground for a more serious hope: not that judgment disappears, but that it is freed from cruelty; not that evil is inconsequential, but that it is overcome; not that death ends every distinction, but that life, truth and love have the final word.

A note on the constructive second half: Much of the biblical and theological thinking behind it was sharpened for me by Professor Arnold Huijgen’s recent Dutch book Inferno: De ontdekking van de hel. Huijgen is a Reformed theologian who argues that inherited ideas of hell need to be deconstructed, but he does not stop there. He then attempts a careful Christian reconstruction. One idea in particular stayed with me: Huijgen reads hell as a series of negatives of who Christ is: death rather than life, falsehood rather than truth, darkness rather than light, hunger rather than bread, and exclusion rather than communion. I mention the book because readers interested in the fuller exegetical and theological argument deserve to know where they can find it. The book is available as a Dutch e-book. Readers who do not know Dutch may be able to read it for personal study with the help of AI-assisted translation.