Someone once said that there are two ways to get a donkey to move. One way was to dangle a carrot in front to the donkey’s face so that the donkey would move toward the carrot. The other way was to hit the donkey on the hindquarters with a stick so that the donkey would move to get away from the pain.
Religious leaders and preachers use similar tactics to get their followers to behave in the proper manner. The carrot is heaven and the stick is hell.
I have previously discussed the invention of hell and its history as well as the history and invention of Satan.
Billy Graham confronts a reader’s disbelief in the existence of hell in the January 11, 2012, Sioux Falls Argus Leader. Billy’s reader says, “Did Jesus ever say anything about hell? I don't believe in hell myself. I believe God is a God of love and wouldn't send anyone to hell. I think preachers who talk about hell all the time are just trying to scare people into believing in their religion.” You can read all of Billy’s answer here.
Billy responds by saying that Jesus talked about hell more than anyone else in the Bible. This actually tells us more about the culture of Jesus than it tells about the reality of hell. Until the last books of the Hebrew Testament were written, about 200 BCE, hell was not an important part of Hebrew theology. It wasn’t until two factors converged that the modern idea of hell was created.
First, the Hebrew theologians could not explain why, sometimes, good people suffer and bad people prosper. Second, Persian kings conquered the Hebrews and the Persian philosophy of the struggle between good and evil was incorporated into Hebrew theology.
Satan was elevated to the position of God’s archenemy and blamed for all the evil in the world. Satan, in hell, in the afterlife, would punish the evil people who prospered in life. Good people who suffered in life would be rewarded, in heaven, after death.
Billy says Jesus talked about the reality of hell. This only shows that the writers of the Gospels thought Jesus believed that hell was a real place. It does not prove the existence of hell.
Why would Jesus talk about hell so much? The easy answer is the carrot and the stick. Jesus was a reformer; He wanted the Jews to change their behavior. A careful reading of the Gospels reveals that Jesus believed the end of the world was going to happen very soon.
Mark 9:1 “And [Jesus] said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.’”
In Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians 4:17: “After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.”
The letters of Paul were probably written within a couple of decades of the death of Jesus, around 50 CE and Mark was written about 70 CE. These early writings show a Jesus that expected the kingdom He predicted to arrive soon after He had spoken about it.
The teachings of Jesus show that He expected to people to behave much differently than they had been. A major change in behavior requires a big carrot or a big stick. While Jesus does speak about the kingdom He was predicting, He spends much more time trying to force the behavioral change by talking about the pain and suffering that will occur in hell.
Modern preachers are much the same. Once you have said heaven is wonderful and perfect there isn’t much left to say. On the other hand, you can go on for hours about the pain and suffering in hell.
Most people have no way to relate to the wonders of heaven. We may have experienced some peace and good times in life; we may have experienced some joy and even ecstasy. Those feelings are brief and fleeting. We have all experienced pain. In some cases the pain may have lingered for a long time. It is these memories that the preachers tap into when they talk about hell. The pain of intense heat is a recurrent theme in these sermons because the memory of a bad burn is in almost everyone’s mind. It is also a pain that most people would prefer to avoid.
The other aspect of hell is imagining people you don’t like being tortured for eternity. Most people envision something like the hell of Dante when they think about hell. This is a place where people are punished according to the sins they committed while alive.
Dante did not create this vision of hell, however. Peter supposedly wrote an Apocalypse that has much the same type of punishment fitting the sin as in Dante, but without the circular levels of Dante. [Peter was a fisher in a backwater Roman province, may not have been to read and write the Aramaic that he spoke, and probably could not have written a carefully thought-out letter in Greek.]
The torments of hell were popular entertainment during the Middle Ages when touring theatrical groups would put on performances that included a set representing the mouth of hell, Satan, demons and various people suffering torment. The hellfire and damnation preachers of our age are the direct descendants of these nomadic stage companies. Billy places himself squarely in the middle of these performers.
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