A number of books have been written this century by people who have gone to heaven and returned: Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, My Journey to Heaven: What I Saw and How It Changed My Life, Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back ( The little boy later said he made the whole thing up. Sounds like he has a lot of repenting to do), Heaven Looks a Lot Like the Mall (This title tempted me, but turns out that, unlike the others in this genre, it’s fiction.)
For some reason books such as: Near Death Experiences in Hell: The True Stories of 10 People Who Went to Hell During their NDE, have not made it to the best seller lists. Hell is no longer as popular as Heaven. Not even in churches anymore, though Hell had been a mainstay for Christian churches for centuries.
I blame this shift in popularity on the lack of education in the humanities. Dante’s Inferno would keep anyone on the straight and narrow (literally). That being true, it is also true that Dante critics agree the images of the Inferno are far more engaging than the images of Paradiso. Likewise, Milton’s Paradise Lost stars an engaging Lucifer, the ultimate bad-boy hero. Perhaps Robert De Nero or Jack Nickolson or, new-comer to the genre, Kevin Spacey could take a crack at Milton’s Satan. Heaven may be a nice place, but hell is riveting. Hell is a real guy thing; heaven is way too girly, like chic lit.
Read our Jonathan Edwards if you must: “…without a doubt the torments of hell are inconceivably great…” He goes on to praise God for hell because watching the torments of their fellows makes their own joy greater. What is more Christian than that?
Great literature is chock full of murder, lying, cheating, forbidden lust, battles, war, conflict of all kinds. All the things that land people in hell. In King Lear we watch the main character destroy himself because of his own tragic flaw. The audience longs to shout out to him, “No! Don’t banish her!” We watched it for the first time in 1606 and watch it still. Riveting.
Though heaven has bypassed hell as the place to be, the tables are turning. Hell is entering more conversations, partly because people are increasingly able to create it for ourselves. A new hero, Greta Thunberg is a voice crying in the wilderness foretelling fires, suffering, unending destruction. The visions are terrifying and frighteningly real. We love her.
In “Patheos” this July Chuck McKnight wrote that progressive Christians should be preaching hell more. “So maybe, rather than immediately rushing in to clarify what we think Jesus means by hell, we should instead take a look at what gets Jesus so worked up in the first place.
“The standard Evangelical teaching is that hell is a place for those who don’t believe in Jesus ….More often than not, biblical references to hell and judgment are in response to social evils carried out in the here and now.
“For example, Jesus preaches hell for those who harm children, he preaches hell for those who fail to welcome strangers or provide basic necessities for those in need, he preaches hell for those who hoard excessive wealth, and he really goes off on hypocritical religious leaders who use their faith as a mask to hide their own complicity in such things….”
Religion, Sight Unseen 