What the Hades?! (Part 3)

In this post, I specifically consider the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus found in Luke 16.

A picture of the Gates of Hades in Caesarea Philippi.

Last week, I began a series on the topic of “hell”.

In part 1, I laid out the background to two major terms used in Scripture: sheol (Hebrew) and hades (Greek). Simply stated, they are the realm of the dead, the place of the grave for all humanity. Nothing more, nothing less. That means they are neither a place of eternal bliss or eternal torment.

Part 2 consisted of me addressing the term gehenna, which is the typical word translated as “hell”. This was an actual place outside the city of Jerusalem. In Hebrew, it was “The Valley of Ben Hinnom,” with the Greek translating it to “Valley of Gehenna.” Gehenna was a place of destruction and fire. Plenty of Jews walked it day in and day out, including Jesus. They knew exactly what was being referenced in Jesus’s warning.

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What I should have offered in my last article is that you can actually visit “hell” before dying, meaning you can visit the Valley of Gehenna today, again, just outside of Jerusalem. It’s just that the landscape has changed to a beautiful place, as seen in the picture below.

So, yes, people can go to gehenna (“hell”), but not to be consciously tormented/burned for eternity.

Moving on…

I am aware that some would look to conflate the concepts of hades (the grave) and gehenna (“hell”). And, if these two are basically the same, then hades is an actual place of torment. One of the better arguments for this is made from Luke 16:19-31, what we call The Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. Here are a few verses to set the scene:

22 The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. 23 In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. 24 So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’

From this text, it would seem clear that hades is a place of fiery torment. But you know I will contend against such an argument. Here are a few reasons why.

If we read the verses leading up to the story of Lazarus and the rich man, we see who and what is ultimately being addressed: “Pharisees who loved money.” Jesus declares: “You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of others, but God knows your hearts. What people value highly is detestable in God’s sight” (vs14-15).

Consequently, in the context, Jesus is not addressing what happens post-mortem, much less any details regarding torment. He’s addressing a group of Jewish leaders who love money. And they are about to get the shock of their lives when they hear Jesus speak about the reversal of fortune, a theme throughout Luke’s Gospel, for both the rich man and the discarded beggar!

Furthermore, this is a parable, which is a storied account given to teach. It will do us well to remember that, in parables, the goal is not that each and every detail carries a spiritual meaning for something real in life. The goal is to provide one major point of instruction (or challenge). That’s what Jesus, the great parable-crafter, does here. The Pharisees, who are great lovers of money rather than great lovers of God and others, are being challenged about the evil intent of their hearts. Even more, they will receive a surprise that this despised beggar — covered in sores, longing to eat scraps from the floor, continually licked by the dogs — was the one who would be welcomed into Abraham’s kingdom over and above these Pharisees.

Very scandalous in the eyes of these Jewish leaders.

Do we think one instance allows for a strong case that Jesus is teaching hades is a place of fiery torment? Can the case be made from a storied parable that carries a focus of condemning the money-loving ways of the Pharisees? I think that the claim that hades is a place of torment is an argument that holds very little water.

New Testament scholar Andrew Perriman notes in his work Hell and Heaven in Narrative Perspective Jesus is probably “evoking such traditional stories in order to construct a vivid and populist critique of the complacency of the wealthy” (loc. 919-920).

Remember the central focus of the narrative in Luke 16, as highlighted above.

Edward Fudge, one of the prominent teachers of annihilationism (that unbelievers will be brought to destruction rather than eternally tormented), states it this way:

“Few serious interpreters attempt to take the details of the story literally. To do so would require us to imagine the saved and the lost conversing with each other after death, in full view of each other and at close range...

Even if this story were historical narrative rather than parable, and even if Jesus had told it in answer to a question about the afterlife (which, of course, he did not), and even if we ought to understand all of its details literally (which no one says we should), the parable of the rich man and Lazarus still would tell us absolutely nothing about the final destiny of the damned.” (Two Views of Hell: A Biblical and Theological Dialogue, p41)

Fudge’s point is well taken.

I, too, echo this overall problem of viewing the parable of the rich man and Lazarus as teaching that hades is a place of eternal conscious torment through fire. This gives us no foundation for our modern conception of “hell”. This is beyond the scope of Luke 16 — and the full tenor of Scripture as well. Instead, as I have tried my best to highlight thus far in the series, hades is the realm of the dead, signified by the grave itself.

In my next article, I want to consider specific descriptors such as eternal and everlasting, especially as they are used in phrases like “eternal punishment” and “everlasting destruction.”