10 Things This Huffington Post Writer Got Wrong About Hell

Claim #7: Hell is “more real” in the Aeneid than in the New Testament.

Hell is far more real in Virgil’s Aeneid than in the New Testament.

I confess that I’m not up on the Aeneid. So, like the last fact, I’ll just say—so?

If you’re looking for a concept of hell as a cartoonish underworld where dead souls are sent for all eternity, then I would indeed assume you’d be more likely to find it in Roman literature than in the Bible. But the Bible does not describe hell in such terms. Let it speak for itself, Mr. Sweeney.

In the Old Testament, we learn that the dead go down to Sheol (“the grave,” the realm of the dead), a curse on humanity brought about by Adam’s sin, where they await the resurrection of all dead at the end of the world (Daniel 12). The God-followers of history understood that God would deliver them somehow, and that the “underworld” of Sheol wasn’t their final home (see Psalm 16:10). The Bible further draws out that in Sheol was an area of paradise for the righteous and an area of conscious torment for the wicked (see Luke 16). But when Christ died, paying for the sins of all God’s people past, present and future, the way back into God’s presence was opened up: The righteous who are dead can now reside with God in heaven (2 Cor. 5:8), while the dead are still confined to the punishment of Sheol, which today we also call hell. But all this is still temporary; we’re awaiting the resurrection, when God will give the righteous perfect bodies to live on a New Earth forever with him, and the wicked will be raised from the dead only to be thrown into the Lake of Fire—which is eternal (see John 5, Revelation 20).

That is a far more nuanced picture of hell than you see in any of the other world myths or religions. And there’s a key difference between the full biblical picture of hell and the cultural Christian caricature of the afterlife: In the Bible, God’s goal isn’t just to split up dead men’s souls into two groups, but to recreate Earth the way it was before sin entered the world and live freely with his redeemed people forever, reversing what Adam did in Eden, while those who rejected Christ are doomed to suffer God’s wrath forever.