Metaphorical Hell

The Story

Almost everyone who reads the Gospels notices the problem sooner or later: the New Testament does not describe hell with one picture, but with a whole gallery of them, and they do not obviously fit together. There is fire — an “unquenchable fire,” a “furnace of fire,” a “lake of fire.” But there is also “outer darkness,” a place of gloom where the damned are bound hand and foot. There is “destruction” and “perishing.” There is the worm that does not die, the closed door, the great fixed chasm. Taken as literal physics, fire and darkness sit awkwardly together: a fire gives light. The metaphorical reading of hell begins precisely here. It proposes that these images are exactly that — images — pointing past themselves to a reality (final separation from God, the ruin of a human life) that no single picture can capture.

This is not a modern invention. Many of the church fathers read at least some of the hell-language symbolically, and medieval and Reformation theologians regularly distinguished the “pain of loss” (separation from God) from the “pain of sense” (fire), treating the loss as primary. What is modern is the confidence with which a metaphorical reading is now offered as the most natural one, rather than a reluctant concession. The shift owes much to the twentieth century’s broad recovery of the way biblical apocalyptic uses symbol.

The figure most associated with the view in popular imagination is C. S. Lewis, though he is hard to file. In The Problem of Pain Lewis wrote that “the doors of hell are locked on the inside,” and his fantasy The Great Divorce pictures hell as a grey town that its inhabitants will not leave — a state, chosen and self-reinforcing, more than a furnace. Lewis still affirmed hell as real and dreadful; he simply doubted that the fire was thermometer-fire.

The British New Testament scholar N. T. Wright has pressed a similar line in more academic terms, describing hell less as a torture chamber and more as “progressive dehumanization” — the outcome when a person persistently refuses God and, in Wright’s phrase, colludes with their own un-making until they are no longer recognizably an image-bearer. The biblical writers, Wright argues, used “very vivid and terrifying language,” and the mistake is to read that language as a literal description of post-mortem mechanics. Many progressive and mainline Christians have settled into some version of this reading, as have a number of evangelicals: William V. Crockett defended “hell as metaphorical” as one of the standard options in the widely used Four Views on Hell (Counterpoints series, edited by Crockett, 1992).

The view has no council attached to it, no anathema, no trial. It lives instead in the ordinary friction between a doctrine everyone agrees is taught and images nobody agrees how to read.

Who Draws the Line

Because there is no formal condemnation of metaphorical hell as such, the contest runs along a fault line inside nearly every tradition rather than between them. The pressure comes chiefly from those who hold that the fire, or at least the conscious suffering, must be taken as a real description and not a figure of speech.

Confessional Protestants who affirm eternal conscious torment — much of the Reformed, Lutheran, and Baptist mainstream — generally do not condemn the metaphorical reading outright, since “fire” can be a symbol of a genuine and dreadful reality. The objection sharpens only when “metaphor” is taken to soften the thing symbolized — to make hell into a mood, a this-worldly shrinking, or a merely psychological state with no lasting verdict. Roman Catholic teaching likewise insists hell is real and eternal while explicitly leaving room for the fire-language to be understood symbolically; the Catechism speaks of hell primarily as “definitive self-exclusion from communion with God.” Eastern Orthodoxy goes further still in the symbolic direction, with a strong strand teaching that “fire” names the experience of God’s own love by those who refuse it — the same light, felt as torment. So the line, where it is drawn, is rarely “metaphor versus literal” but “metaphor that still names a real and final judgment” versus “metaphor that explains the judgment away.”

Why You Might Accidentally Believe This

You might arrive here just by reading carefully and refusing to look away from the diversity of the images. If you take “outer darkness” and “lake of fire” with equal seriousness, you cannot take both as literal physics; one of them has to be a picture, and once one is a picture it is hard to see why the other is not. The honest reader who wants to do justice to all the texts at once is pushed, almost mechanically, toward reading them as a cluster of complementary symbols.

You might also get here through Jesus’ own usage. His main word for hell is Gehenna — Greek transliteration of Ge-Hinnom, the Valley of Hinnom, an actual ravine outside Jerusalem with a grim history as a site of child sacrifice in Israel’s past. When Jesus says a sin could land you in “Gehenna,” he is already speaking figuratively: he is naming a real geographical valley and using it to point beyond itself. The metaphor is not something later readers imposed; it appears to be built into the word he chose.

The Strongest Case For This View

The first argument is the one already noted: the images are plural and, read flatly, mutually exclusive. Matthew has the condemned cast into “the outer darkness” where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 8:12; Matthew 22:13; Matthew 25:30), and also into a “furnace of fire” (Matthew 13:42). Mark has “the unquenchable fire” and the undying worm (Mark 9:43-48). Revelation has the “lake of fire” (Revelation 20:14-15). Paul speaks not of fire at all but of “eternal destruction” and exclusion “from the presence of the Lord” (2 Thessalonians 1:9). A reading that treats one of these as the literal truth and the rest as accommodation looks arbitrary; a reading that treats them all as converging symbols of one terrible reality treats the whole witness evenly.

The second argument is from genre. Much of this language is apocalyptic, a mode that trades in fire, beasts, dragons, and falling stars precisely as symbols. Few readers think the dragon of Revelation 12 is a literal reptile; the metaphorical reader simply asks for consistency, that the lake of fire be read in the same key as the rest of the book.

The third argument is moral and is the one Lewis and Wright press: a hell understood as the natural terminus of a freely chosen rejection of God — a self-locked door — answers the ancient charge that endless physical torture is disproportionate to finite sin. On this reading the door is locked from the inside; God does not stoke a furnace so much as honor, finally and forever, a creature’s settled “no.” The horror is not lessened, only relocated, from divine cruelty to creaturely self-ruin.

The Strongest Case Against

The strongest objection is that metaphor is not the opposite of reality, and that calling the fire “symbolic” can quietly become a way of not believing in the thing symbolized. A metaphor points to something; the question is what. Defenders of a more literal reading argue that the New Testament’s relentless, sober repetition of warning language — on Jesus’ own lips more than anyone’s — is not the register of poetic flourish but of urgent fact, and that softening it betrays the very people Jesus was trying to warn.

Second, critics note that conceding the fire is a symbol does not, by itself, deliver any of the gentler conclusions metaphorical readers often want. A symbol can point to something worse than its literal sense, not milder. “Outer darkness” and “destruction” are not obviously more comforting than flame; if anything, separation from the source of all life and joy may be the bleakest picture of the set. So the metaphorical move, taken honestly, does not automatically defang hell — and where it is used to do so, its critics say, it has stopped being interpretation and become evasion.

Third, the apparent contradiction may be overstated. Several interpreters argue that fire and darkness are complementary, not contradictory — that ancient hearers could hold both as overlapping pictures of one judgment without demanding they cohere as a single physical scene, much as we speak of being “frozen with fear” and “burning with shame” of the same moment. On this account the diversity of images is not evidence of metaphor-versus-literal at all, but simply the ordinary thickness of biblical description.

What the New Testament Actually Says

The New Testament data genuinely underdetermine the question, which is why sincere readers in every tradition land in different places. What the texts give us, unmistakably, is a doctrine of final, weighty, irreversible judgment, described through a deliberately varied set of images: fire (Matthew 13:42; Mark 9:43; Revelation 20:14-15), darkness (Matthew 8:12; Jude 1:13), destruction and perishing (2 Thessalonians 1:9; John 3:16), and exclusion from God’s presence. What the texts do not give us is a single, harmonized physical description, or any sentence telling us how literally to take any one image.

Jesus’ choice of Gehenna is the clearest internal clue that figurative usage is already in play: he names a real valley outside Jerusalem and turns it into an emblem of judgment, so that even the most “literal” reading is reading a place-name as a picture. At the same time, nothing in the texts licenses the inference from “this is a symbol” to “this is therefore mild” or “this is therefore only about the present life.” The images may be figures; what they figure is presented as utterly real.

The honest conclusion is that the New Testament tells us hell is real, final, and dreadful, and tells us about it almost entirely in pictures — leaving the church a lasting, unresolved task of deciding which pictures are windows and which are walls.

Further Reading

• C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (1940) — the source of “the doors of hell are locked on the inside.”
• C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (1945) — hell imagined as a self-chosen grey town.
• William V. Crockett, ed., Four Views on Hell (Counterpoints, 1992) — includes Crockett’s own defense of the metaphorical view alongside literal, conditionalist, and purgatorial views.
• N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (2008) — hell as “dehumanization” within a broader account of resurrection and judgment.
• Joachim Jeremias, “geenna,” in the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament — standard lexical treatment of Gehenna and the Valley of Hinnom.
• Edward Fudge and Robert A. Peterson, Two Views of Hell (InterVarsity, 2000) — a debate between the conditionalist (annihilationist) and traditional eternal-conscious-torment positions on the nature and duration of hell.