by Patrick Navas
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I just finished reading Edward Fudge’s newest work, A Final Word on Hell, a book that, in my opinion, needs to be read by every professing “evangelical” and Bible-believing Christian. How any Christian could read this book carefully and still come away believing that the traditional doctrine of never-ending-torture is biblical is, truly, mind-boggling—though experience tells me that such would prove to be so in the case of most traditional pastors, preachers and church-goers.
Fudge makes all the points that need to be made with utmost clarity and impact, with the exception of one. Fudge makes statements like “hell” is “real,” hell is “bad,” “hell” is “eternal,” etc., and uses the word “hell” with seeming approval all throughout the book. What Fudge should have explained in the very beginning of his book is that, from a strictly biblical perspective, “hell” does not exist. That is to say, the word “hell” is a misnomer and never should have been used as an English translation of the Greek word “gehenna” to begin with. Gehenna is a proper name, just like “Galilee” or “Jerusalem,” and should have been translated (or transliterated) as such, as it thankfully is in several, though less popular, Bible translations (New American Bible, New World Translation, Concordant Literal, Rotherham’s Emphasized Bible, Young’s Literal Translation). It is good that at least some translations (like ESV, RSV, and others) have footnotes on the word “hell” which point out that the underlying Greek word is gehenna. Philip’s Modern English gives a good paraphrase for gehenna at Matt 10:28: “the fires of destruction,” certainly much better than the traditional “hell.”
I could be wrong, but I get the impression that a lot of evangelical annhilitionsists, including Fudge, want to preserve the word “hell” in the official “Christian vocabulary” in an attempt to “appease” the status quo on some level—as if to say, “yes, you can still believe in ‘hell,’ and continue to preach it; you just have to define it as a place of destruction as opposed to a place of everlasting torment.” This is certainly a vast improvement over the traditional view because it correctly defines the concept, at least, as a place where both body and soul can be “destroyed” by God as opposed to kept alive throughout the endless stretches of eternity only to be tormented (See Matt. 10:28). But why not go further and abandon the unbiblical word “hell” altogether and use the biblical gehenna?
Fudge’s inconsistency on this point stood out most to me on page 133 where he correctly says of 2 Peter 2:4:
“Some translations say these angels are in ‘hell,’ but that is misleading. Second Peter says ‘Tartarus,’ a location in Homer’s ‘Odyssey.’ It does not say gehenna, the New Testament’s ‘hell’ of final punishment.”
If Fudge were consistent, he would have said the same thing about Matthew 10:28 and about every other text containing the word Gehenna yet translated erroneously as “hell” in most English Bibles. If it is “misleading” to translate tartarus as “hell,” as Fudge points out, then it is equally misleading to translate gehenna as “hell” which, for most modern Bible readers, is a word that signifies a fiery place of everlasting pain and suffering, something that Jesus did not mean when he made reference to gehenna.
This reminds me a bit of the word “church.” Most English translations retain the word as a translation of the Greek ekklesia, probably because people are so accustomed to it and because they like the “traditional’” flavor of it. William Tyndale was right, however, in the 1500s when he translated it as “congregation,” since that is what the word actually means, a gathering of people, an assembly, not a “religious-building-with-a-pulpit-and-pews,” or a “religious-organization-or-denomination-with-a-hierarchical-structure-and-property-holdings,” i.e., the concept perhaps most people have in mind when they think of the word “church” or the phrase “going to church.”
To me this was the only (minor) “flaw” in the book. Overall, I wholeheartedly agree with the book and recommend it to all Christians who take the Scriptures seriously. Fudge is right. The doctrine of everlasting torture is based on a combination of (1) the widespread yet unbiblical belief in the soul’s inherent immortality, and (2) a misinterpretation of the relevant biblical texts, which has, unfortunately, resulted in a centuries-long misrepresentation of the biblical message and the biblical God.
by Patrick Navas