- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131857.2019.1675470
- The word ‘Hell’ is derived from an Anglo-Saxon word hellia (derived from the Old English, Old Norse, Old High German, hel, helle, circa. 725 AD) that is used in the King James version of the Bible to capture the Jewish concept of ‘Gehanna’ as the final destination of the wicked. The word occurs a number of times in different verses as the ‘Valley of Hinnom’, a garbage dump outside Jerusalem where children were sacrificed to the god Moloch and the bodies of those who died in sin were thrown on the garbage fires. The valley was accursed and certain sins such as adultery, idolatry, pride, mockery, hypocrisy, and anger, led to the abode of the damned. ‘Gehenna’ originates from the Ancient Greek and Ancient Hebrew that takes the form of the Greek ‘Geenna’ which is found in the New Testament, a phonetic transcription of the Aramaic Gēhannā. The concept is also found in the Old Testament and the Talmud figuring as a place of punishment for the wicked after the resurrection.
- By contrast, Hades in Ancient Greece is the god of the dead and king of the underworld, often represented as the three-headed dog Cerberus. Hades ruled the underworld where souls of the dead end up, Poseidon ruled the seas and Zeus, the sky. Tartarus, originally a place to imprison those who posed a threat to the rule of the Olympians, later became a place of punishment for those who had committed serious crimes; in contrast to Elysium where the righteous came to rest. Tartarus is a place beneath Hades deep in the earth far from the sun engulfed in gloom and inhabited by monsters and giants. Punishments were administered for crimes that included those who hated their brothers and beat their fathers, defrauded their family, and accumulated wealth without sharing it. Many of these offences interestingly involved issues of trust and loyalty. Their punishments designed to fit the crime involved being spread eagled on the spokes of a wheel or rolling around huge rocks for eternity as in the Myth of Sisyphus, that becomes the main figure and metaphor for Albert Camus’ famous essay on the futility of the search for meaning. In Hesiod’s Theogony, an account of the genealogies of the gods, Chaos, Gaia (Earth) and Tartarus emerged with the creation of the universe revealing a pre-existent divine order first visualized imaginatively before being thought in abstract terms much later as the basis of Greek philosophy.
- The Christian concept and doctrine of hell is used some twenty-three times in the New Testament although it is not in the Greek New Testament which uses the Greek concepts Tartarus or Hades, or the Hebrew concept Gehinnom. The Christian concept of Hell we have inherited and fashioned, then, is a theological combination of three ancient concepts derived from Greek and Hebrew mythology and theology, even although they have different origins and meanings. The notion of Hell predates Christianity by thousands of years by Egyptian and sources of Jewish mysticism such as the Kabbalah. The Kabbalah mentions seven different divisions of Hell (including, ‘Gehinnom’ and ‘Sheol’ meaning Hades or underworld is the most common) and seven divisions of Heaven.
- The history and the concept of Hell has played a central theological role in Christian (and religions of the Abrahamic persuasion) religious life and education as the place of eternal damnation where evil souls are punished. It was a substantial part of the furniture that housed the moral tradition and Christian mythology that ‘educated’ the population and provided the moral basis for law, justice and order within institutions that comprised society. Theories of Hell were depicted as nightmarish visions that embellished early scriptures, church decorations, and paintings. In its Christianized form it became a source and warrant of reinforcing the moral teaching of the Church, later the monasteries schools and also as a basis of medieval control of children. As Benjamin W. McCraw and Robert Arp (2015), in their Introduction to The Concept of Hell:
- Eternal flames, pitchforking demons, and suffering cries of those damned have dominated popular conceptions of Hell. Such a picture has varying degrees of reflection in serious philosophical and theological thought running throughout the history of consideration of the topic. The concept of Hell combines a number of notions of perennial investigation: the nature of the afterlife, Divine judgment, the ultimate ends of human existence, our place in the grand scheme of the cosmos, and a host of others. Accordingly, philosophers and theologians have found the topic ripe for many different kinds of discussions, positions, and approaches from a wide variety of traditions, methodologies, and interests.
- These forbidding scenes and visions were used to ‘educate’ children and to teach children about the problem of evil and how an all-powerful God deals with suffering and evil. It is also a theological basis for the understanding of divine justice, the proportionality of punishment, and retributive justice as the framework for a moral system. As Foresman (2015) points out:
- There is a common enough belief in contemporary western society that Hell is a place of punishment for those souls judged unrighteous by God. And though it may seem from Biblical passages that this has always been the prevailing view of the Church, in Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, Philippe Ariès (1974) argues that this popular contemporary belief, that one’s afterlife is determined by how one lives, was not prevalent until the 12th and 13th centuries. Before then death meant that bodies entrusted to the church went to sleep. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131857.2019.1675470)
- What this brief analysis tries to demonstrate for educational theory is the role the concept of Hell played in the Christian moral system, how it changed over the course of the centuries, and the bedrock role it had within the moral ‘education’ of children. What is its role today? For many Christians and Christian educators Hell is no longer a place for the wicked but rather a state of being, in particular, a state of self-exclusion from communion with God. The change from a place to a state of being is a recent conceptual theological revision of the concept. It is still a forbidding vision of dying in mortal sin without repenting or redemption and being eternally separated from God by one’s own free choice. Damnation for eternity is a rather harsh punishment especially if it also means separation from the church and one’s community—it’s a permanent marginalization as forever the Other.
