What Is Hell?

Eternal Separation

“These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Matthew 25:46

Is there a hell? Jehovah’s Witnesses say no — or rather, that “hell” is only the grave, that the dead are unconscious, and that the finally wicked are not punished forever but annihilated, destroyed out of existence. Eternal torment, they argue, would be an insult to a God of love.

The Catholic Church agrees that the cartoon hell of gleeful devils is a distortion — but holds that Jesus himself, who is also love, spoke of a real, conscious, and eternal loss. The question is what he actually taught, and whether “destruction” means extinction or ruin.

Let’s weigh the Watchtower’s case against the words of Christ — the word Gehenna, the sentence of Matthew 25:46, the meaning of “destruction” — and ask … Are the lost simply snuffed out of existence, or is hell the self-chosen, eternal loss of the God for whom we were made — a door locked from the inside?

I invite your engagement with me on these questions. You may leave comments below, but please be sure to read our policy on commenting before doing so.

Watchtower View

Jump to the Catholic View ↓

Jehovah’s Witnesses reject the traditional doctrine of hell entirely. There is no place of conscious, eternal torment; the very idea, they hold, slanders a God of love and was borrowed from pagan philosophy. The finally wicked are not punished forever but annihilated — destroyed out of existence.

What They Teach

“Hell” is just the grave. The words translated “hell” — Hebrew Sheol, Greek Hades — mean only “the common grave of mankind,” where the dead lie unconscious (Eccl. 9:5, 10). Even faithful men like Jacob and Job “went to hell” in this sense (Gen. 37:35; Job 14:13).1

No eternal torment. The dead are unconscious and feel nothing (Eccl. 9:5). A fiery hell of endless torture is “contrary to the Bible’s teaching that ‘God is love’” (1 John 4:8) and is traced to Plato and the ancient Egyptians, not to Scripture. The sharpest text is Jeremiah’s: when Judah burned its sons in the valley of Hinnom — the very valley whose name became Gehenna — God called it a thing “which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind” (Jer. 7:31). A punishment of burning people, the argument runs, is something that by God’s own word never entered His mind.2

The wicked are annihilated. Those who finally reject God are not tormented but destroyed forever — “Gehenna” symbolizes everlasting destruction, nonexistence. The penalty for sin is death, not torment: “the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23), and “dust you are and to dust you will return” (Gen. 3:19).3

Scripture shows people wanting to go there, and being let out. Job prayed that God would hide him in Sheol until His anger passed (Job 14:13) — nobody asks to be hidden in a torture chamber. And at the judgment “death and Hades gave up the dead in them” (Rev. 20:13): hell is emptied. A place of endless torment could neither shelter a righteous man nor surrender anyone it held.4

The rich man and Lazarus is a parable. The account in Luke 16:19–31 is figurative, not a report of conditions after death. Read literally it would have the saved and the damned within speaking distance and a drop of water able to ease the torment of hell, which no one believes. The rich man and the beggar stand for classes of people, and their reversal of fortunes represents a change that came upon those classes during the ministry of Christ and the apostles.5

Endnotes
  1. On “hell” (Sheol/Hades) as the common grave, see “Is Hell Real? What Does the Bible Say About Hell?” (jw.org), citing Psalm 16:10; Acts 2:31; Genesis 37:35; Job 14:13. ↩
  2. On the rejection of eternal torment as unscriptural and pagan in origin, see “Is Hell Real?” (jw.org), citing Ecclesiastes 9:5; 1 John 4:8; Jeremiah 7:31; 32:35, and tracing the doctrine to Plato and Egyptian sources. ↩
  3. On the annihilation of the wicked and death (not torment) as the penalty for sin, see “What Is Hell? Is It a Place of Eternal Torment?” (jw.org), citing Romans 6:23; Genesis 3:19; Matthew 10:28; the “second death” of Revelation 21:8 as everlasting destruction. ↩
  4. On Job 14:13 and Revelation 20:13 as evidence that “hell” is the grave rather than a place of torment, see Let God Be True (Watch Tower, 1952), 88–99, and Reasoning From the Scriptures (Watch Tower, 1985), 168–75. ↩
  5. On Luke 16:19–31 as a parable representing classes of people rather than a description of the afterlife, see Reasoning From the Scriptures (1985), 168–75, and Let God Be True (1952), 98. ↩

Catholic View

The Catholic Church holds that hell is real, eternal, and conscious — and that it is not something God inflicts on people who wanted Him. It is the self-chosen loss of God by those who refuse Him to the end — in the Catechism’s definition, which comes first, “definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed” (CCC 1033). Much of what the Watchtower attacks, the Church rejects too: the devils with pitchforks, the God who enjoys tormenting. The real question is what Jesus taught, and He spoke of hell more often than anyone else in Scripture.

Where the Watchtower Is Right

Sheol and Hades often do mean simply the grave, and older Bibles that translated every such word “hell” bred real confusion. Jacob and Job did expect to go to Sheol. That also answers two favorite proof texts: the “hell” Job asked to be hidden in (Job 14:13) and the “hell” that gives up its dead at the judgment (Rev. 20:13) are both the grave — and the Church says the same. But here the address is read correctly while the household goes unvisited, because the word Jesus uses for the destiny of the lost is a different word.

Gehenna: The Word Jesus Used

When Jesus warns of final punishment He says Gehenna, not Sheol — the accursed valley outside Jerusalem that had become an image of the place of the damned. Of it He says “the worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:48). The Witness reply is ready: the image comes from Isaiah 66:24, where worm and fire work on corpses. But Jesus does not quote it as Isaiah wrote it. In His mouth the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched — language that suggests duration rather than a fire that finishes its fuel and goes out. Suggests, not settles: the imagery is not decisive by itself, and the decisive texts come below. Nor does Jeremiah 7:31 reach the doctrine: what God said never came into His mind was Israel sacrificing its children to Molech in that valley — the abomination that made Hinnom accursed — not the existence of divine judgment, which Jeremiah himself proclaims on nearly every page. Jesus chose the valley as His image of final loss precisely because its horror was proverbial. And He calls the same place one of “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 8:12) — grief only the conscious can do. On the Watchtower’s own teaching the dead are unconscious — and the unconscious do not weep. Revelation says the damned “will be tormented” and “have no rest, day or night” (Rev. 14:10–11). The Greek verb, basanizō, means torment — it is used of demons begging not to be tormented — and it never means to blot out of existence. It cannot, because unconscious torment is a contradiction: there is nobody left for it to be torment to.

One Sentence Is Very Hard to Get Around

Closing His account of the Last Judgment, Jesus sets the two destinies side by side:

These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life (Matt. 25:46)

Be fair to the Watchtower here: it does not dispute that this sentence describes something everlasting. Its translation reads “everlasting cutting-off,” a result that lasts forever. The dispute is the noun. Kolasis means punishment — the lexicons of New Testament Greek give “punishment,” not “cutting-off,” which the Society reaches by defining a related verb and reading it back into the noun. And the sentence sets the two destinies in strict parallel: as the life is something the righteous live, the punishment is something the wicked undergo. A punishment that consists of ceasing to exist is no punishment at all — the annihilated suffer nothing, lack nothing, regret nothing. Jesus calls it punishment, and punishment is something a person experiences.

Two further texts are usually offered. In Revelation 20:14 death and Hades themselves are thrown into the lake of fire, and death cannot be tormented, so the lake, it is said, must mean destruction. But the same chapter has already said of the devil, the beast, and the false prophet that in that lake “they will be tormented day and night for ever and ever” (Rev. 20:10): the image is used of persons in one verse and of abstractions in another, and of the persons it says torment, not ceasing. And Isaiah 34:10, where Edom’s smoke goes up “for ever” though Edom is long gone, shows that a prophet could use the language of unending fire for a temporal ruin; it does not show that Jesus, who took up the same language after Isaiah and applied it to persons, meant less by it than the prophet meant.

“Destruction” Means Ruin, Not Extinction

The wicked are “destroyed” (2 Thess. 1:9) — but the Greek words, apollumi and apoleia, mean ruin and loss, not erasure. They are the words for the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son, none of which had stopped existing. Paul defines “eternal destruction” himself: it is to be “away from the presence of the Lord” — a separation, which requires someone who is separated. The same goes for “the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). In Scripture, death regularly means separation rather than cessation: Adam lived for centuries after the day God said he would die (Gen. 2:17), and Paul calls the Ephesians “dead” in their sins while plainly alive (Eph. 2:1).

The annihilationist’s lead text cuts the other way. “Fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28) opens by conceding the Catholic point: men can kill the body and cannot kill the soul, so the soul survives bodily death. And “can destroy” names a power, not a program — what that destruction is, apollumi has already told us: ruin and loss, the lost sheep and the lost son, not erasure.

The serious form of the annihilationist case is not the Watchtower’s but the conditionalism of evangelical scholars — Edward Fudge’s The Fire That Consumes, John Stott’s cautious sympathy — who grant that the soul survives and read “eternal punishment” as a punishment whose result is eternal. That is the position the texts have to defeat, and it is met where it is strongest: by the strict parallel of Matthew 25:46, and by a judgment that comes in degrees.

Even as a Parable, the Rich Man Tells Against the Theory

Call Luke 16 a parable if you wish — Jesus did not build parables on falsehoods. In the story the dead man is conscious immediately after death: he sees, thirsts, and remembers his five brothers. And notice the Society’s rule at work. The 144,000, a number in a book of symbols, is read with strict literalism, while conscious dead in a teaching of Jesus are set aside as merely a parable. Literal where it helps and figurative where it hurts is not a method of reading.

There Are No Degrees of Nonexistence

Jesus grades the judgment: “more tolerable” for Tyre and Sidon than for Chorazin (Matt. 11:22), a “light beating” for the servant who did not know his master’s will (Luke 12:47–48). Annihilation cannot do this. Extinction is exactly the same for everybody, the mass murderer and the petty thief alike. That does not make God more merciful. It makes Him less just.

What About the God of Love?

Here is the real objection, and it deserves a straight answer. If hell were a torture chamber built by a vindictive God, it would be irreconcilable with love — and the Church would agree. But God “desires all men to be saved” (1 Tim. 2:4), and “God predestines no one to go to hell” (CCC 1037). The fire is the traditional image for the real pain, which is loss: “eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created” (CCC 1035). Hell is what it finally means to be given the “no” you insisted on. C. S. Lewis put the same thought in an image that is his rather than the Church’s, though it catches her meaning exactly: the doors of hell are locked on the inside.

The Reply in Brief

The Watchtower is right that Sheol is often just the grave, and right that God is love. It is wrong that there is no hell. Christ, who is also love, spoke of Gehenna and its unquenchable fire, set eternal punishment in exact parallel with eternal life, and described conscious anguish that extinction cannot explain. As for the charge that eternal punishment is pagan: the pagans also believed in a blessed afterlife, and nobody proposes giving up heaven on that account — and the actual Babylonian afterlife, a dim house of dust where everyone goes alike, looks far more like the Watchtower’s grave than like anything Christian. The destruction of the lost is not their cancellation but their ruin: losing, forever and by their own choice, the God they were made for.

The full essay adds the complete word study behind this page: the beast and false prophet “thrown alive” into the lake of fire, the saved and the lost seeing one another at the judgment (Luke 13:28), how the tradition distinguishes the pain of loss from the pain of sense, what the Church has and has not defined about the fire, and the Babylonian afterlife set beside the Christian one. It is available as a Word document at the end of this page.

Summary

Questions to Answer
  • If the dead are simply unconscious, why does Jesus describe the rich man conscious in torment and Lazarus comforted (Luke 16:22-25)?
  • Jesus calls the punishment of the wicked “eternal” with the very word He calls the life of the righteous “eternal” (Matt. 25:46). If one lasts forever, how does the other not?
  • The Watchtower had to render one Greek word, kolasis (“punishment”), as “cutting-off” to reach its doctrine — a meaning no lexicon assigns it. Why must the translation change for the teaching to stand?
  • If death is annihilation, what is raised at the resurrection of the unjust that Scripture also promises (Acts 24:15)?

These are the questions the Society’s own texts raise, and they deserve answers.

Is hell a place of conscious, eternal loss, or are the wicked simply annihilated? The Watchtower says the dead are unconscious, “hell” is the grave, and the finally wicked are destroyed out of existence. The Catholic Church answers from the words of Jesus, who spoke of hell more often than anyone else in Scripture — and her definition comes first: hell is “definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed” (CCC 1033). (All of it rests on whether the soul survives at all, which is treated on the companion page What Is the Soul?)

“Hell is just the grave” is half right. Sheol and Hades often do mean the grave, and the Church grants it freely. The “hell” Job asked to be hidden in (Job 14:13) and the “hell” emptied at the judgment (Rev. 20:13) are both the grave. But the address is read while the household goes unvisited: the word Jesus uses for final punishment is Gehenna, a different word for a different place.

Gehenna is described as conscious. The undying worm and unquenched fire (Mark 9:48) suggest duration; what is decisive is that there is weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matt. 8:12) — and the unconscious do not weep. Revelation’s damned are “tormented” and “have no rest, day or night” (Rev. 14:10–11); the Greek word means torment and never means erasure, because unconscious torment is a contradiction.

One sentence sets both destinies in parallel. “These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life” (Matt. 25:46). One Greek word, aiōnios, governs both halves. The Society agrees that the word means unending in both halves; what it disputes is the noun, reading kolasis as a cutting-off rather than a punishment, a sense the lexicons do not give it. And a punishment nobody is there to experience is no punishment at all.

“Destruction” means ruin, not erasure. The Greek words are the ones used for the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son — all ruined or astray, none erased. Paul defines eternal destruction as being “away from the presence of the Lord” (2 Thess. 1:9): a separation, which requires someone who is separated. Death in Scripture regularly means separation too — Adam lived on for centuries (Gen. 2:17), and the Ephesians were “dead” in sin while walking around alive (Eph. 2:1).

Even as a parable, the rich man is conscious. Jesus did not build parables on falsehoods, and in this one the dead man sees, thirsts, and remembers (Luke 16). Notice the rule at work: the 144,000 in a book of symbols is read literally, while conscious dead in a teaching of Jesus become merely a parable. Literal where it helps and figurative where it hurts is not a method of reading.

A graded judgment rules out extinction. Jesus says it will be “more tolerable” for some than for others (Matt. 11:22), a light beating for one servant and a severe one for another (Luke 12:47–48). There are no degrees of nonexistence: extinction treats the mass murderer and the petty thief identically. That is not more merciful. It is less just.

Hell is not God’s cruelty; it is love refused. God “desires all men to be saved” (1 Tim. 2:4) and predestines no one to hell (CCC 1037). The fire is the traditional image for the real pain, which is loss: eternal separation from the God we were made for (CCC 1035). Heaven cannot be entered by force, and a final “no” to God is honored — the doors of hell, in Lewis’s image, are locked on the inside.

In short: the Watchtower is right about the grave and right that God is love, and wrong that there is no hell. Christ, who is also love, described a conscious, eternal loss that extinction cannot explain — not because God stops loving the lost, but because He will not force the unwilling to be loved. Christianity’s answer has never been to deny that hell exists, but to point at the One who died so that nobody need go there — “that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

For a more complete essay on this topic, download What Is Hell? (.docx) or (.pdf)

Next: Raised Bodily or as a Spirit?