For my recent guest on Created in the Image of God, writer and longtime Bahá’í David Langness, it was more than a theological concept. As a boy in a small Washington farm town, dropped off alone at the local Lutheran church while his non‑believing parents ran errands, he heard a pastor tell him in no uncertain terms: if you are not good, you may burn forever.
At twelve, he had so many questions that the youth pastor eventually phoned his mother to say, “David isn’t welcome here anymore. He asks too many questions.”
Those early experiences—being both frightened and pushed aside—set David on a lifelong search. He stopped going to that church and began reading widely, visiting other congregations, and asking for himself: What is hell, really? Who decided what it is? And why would a loving God use eternal torture as leverage?
Decades later, drawing from his study of scripture, history, and the Bahá’í writings, David has reached a very different understanding: hell is not a place on God’s map; it is a condition of the soul. And once you see that, a lot begins to change—not just in how you imagine the afterlife, but in how you understand ego, character, and even what heaven is supposed to look like on earth.
I want to share some of what I learned from that conversation.
Where Did “Hell” Come From?
Part of the problem is that when most of us hear the word “hell,” we imagine a specific—a blazing torture chamber somewhere under our feet. But that image is the end result of a long, messy evolution of language and myth.
David walked through some of that history.
In the Hebrew Bible, the most common words are:
- Sheol – the shadowy realm of the dead, not yet clearly divided into reward and punishment.
- The Valley of Hinnom / Gehenna – a real ravine outside ancient Jerusalem, associated with idolatry and child sacrifice. Later, it likely functioned as a garbage dump and cremation site. Constant fires burned refuse and carcasses there.
When Jesus warns about Gehenna, his listeners would have pictured a particular, foul valley they could walk to—a concrete image for spiritual ruin and judgment, not necessarily an underground universe.
In the Greek world, you find:
- Hades – a general underworld of the dead.
- Other mythic regions of torment or imprisonment.
Then there’s the Norse contribution. Long before Scandinavia was Christianized, the north had its own afterlife map:
- Brave warriors who died in battle went to Valhalla, the hall of the slain.
- Those who died “shamefully” or without courage went to Hel (H‑E‑L), ruled by a goddess of the same name, in the realm of Niflheim. It was an icy, joyless place, fed by “frozen rivers of tears.”
In other words, long before Christians in that part of the world spoke of “hell,” there was “Hel”: a cold, dismal shame‑destination.
Fast‑forward to the early 1600s. King James commissions a new English Bible. The translators, working from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek, make a drastic simplifying choice: they collapse Sheol, Gehenna, Hades, “the grave,” and more into a single English word—“hell”—which by then had already absorbed Norse and Anglo‑Saxon associations.
That decision hardened a metaphorical landscape of trash fires, underworlds, and northern ice into one flat term. So when we read “hell” in an English Bible today, we are hearing centuries of translation and cultural baggage, not a single clear idea given straight from God.
None of this proves there is no judgment, no consequence, no real spiritual peril. But it should at least make us more cautious about equating our inherited English mental picture with what the prophets actually had in mind.
Hell as Ego: “The Other Thine Own Self”
If hell is not, finally, a subterranean furnace, what is it?
Here David turned from linguistics to psychology and the Bahá’í writings.
He quoted a striking line from Bahá’u’lláh:
“Where is paradise and where is hell?
The one is reunion with Me;
the other thine own self.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, no friend of easy piety, said something similar in secular terms: “Hell isn’t other people. Hell is yourself.”
Put simply: hell is what my life becomes when I am locked inside my own ego—when my world shrinks to my fears, my appetites, my status, my grievances. When I live turned in on myself, deaf to God, indifferent to others, I am already tasting the outer fringes of hell.
This matches what we see in the best of the Christian scriptures as well. St. Paul’s famous hymn in Philippians 2 describes the mind of Christ in direct contrast to a self‑enclosed life:
“Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit,
but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself.
Let each of you look out not only for his own interests,
but also for the interests of others.
Let this mind be in you
What comes to your mind when you think of Hell? Does this resonate with you? Will it result in any changes in your life - here and now?
Next week on Created in the Image of God, I’ll be joined by Morgan Guyton for a New Year’s special—a wide‑ranging conversation on how to use our privilege for good, cultivate a “culture of mercy,” and build change through real relationships instead of just arguing with strangers online. It’s both a challenge and an invitation for how we might live differently in the year ahead.
