book reviews

The Hell There Is: An Exploration of an Often-Rejected Doctrine of the Church (TAN Books, 2025, 145 pages)

by Monsignor Charles Pope

Reviewed by T. Nelson

The ‘Rapture,’ where all the faithful ascend to heaven, was supposed to happen last week. According to the press, it was a bust: nobody disappeared. But what if it wasn't really a bust? That would be bad news: it means we're all going to hell. If so, we need to know what it's like there.

It may be no coincidence that my USB stick containing Debian Linux 12.7 disappeared on the same day. It reappeared a few days later, probably cast out from heaven due to that abomina­tion called systemd. (I suppose those 39 daemons, the Unix term for back­ground processes, didn't help either.)

I suppose that's a pretty feeble reason to read a book about hell, but hell, why not? It raises interesting philosophical issues and it's a big deal for many people.

But is hell still part of Christianity? Joseph Ratzinger thought so. In Eschatology he wrote that Dogma is on “solid ground” when it talks about hell and eternal punish­ment. Yet when some sects of Christi­anity mention it, they often say hell is merely separation from God or even a path toward personal growth.

In The Hell There Is, Charles Pope says hell is an essential part of Christianity and the de-emphasis of hell is why it's dying. Denying hell, says Msgr. Pope, is heresy because hell is mentioned repeatedly in the Bible, especially by Jesus, who was not just some whacked-out pacifist hippie as some denomina­tions depict him but implicitly discussed hell in 21 of his 38 parables.

Without hell, Pope says, the Church is just a pointless social club. Without hell, he asks, what did Christ save people from? There'd be no reason to avoid sinning and religion would be irrelevant and incoherent.

Ham and dalmatians, a totally different sect

Pope isn't some Evangel­ic­al or a thunder­ing Calvin­ist full of fiery hell and damn­a­tions. But even he admits that most of what people believe about hell is pure specula­tion.

If humans have immortal noncorp­or­eal souls (as I was told ages ago in Sunday school), the possibility of getting stuck in hell would determine your entire strategy in life. If you had one before birth (called preexisten­tial­ism), it would be against your interest even to be born: the likelihood is that sooner or later you'd sin and spend eternity in hell. Therefore, theolog­ians reason­ably concluded that souls must be created here on earth.

To make that consistent, Christianity taught that we're “born in sin,” meaning we're all born evil and the only way to avoid hell is to repent. A baby had to get baptized to “wash away” the sin. (Or so I was told. It's not clear to me whether Christi­an­ity still believes this or considers it to be a quaint ritual.)

Pope lists some sins most of us commit: lusting in your heart, doubting Revela­tion, not believing hell exists, or not caring enough about the poor. Since God decides your fate in a binary fashion, doing any of those could get you burning for eternity.

That seems unjust, so theologians invented different levels of torture for different sins. For centuries, Christ­ian­ity battled over how to avoid hell while ensuring that heretics got there as expedi­tious­ly as possible. They finally decided that good deeds and paying the Church don't work and your only option is to repent and surrender and ask for forgiveness.

Thus, the optimal strategy is to repent and then immedi­ate­ly die. Unfortunately, that would mean if Hitler or Stalin repented just before dying they'd be in heaven, which would also be unjust.

But then Pope says hell isn't punishment. It could indeed be mere separation from God. We have freedom to choose, and the sinner chooses it because he knows he'd be miserable in heaven anyway (all that singing and praying, no Szechuan take­out, and hardly any fornic­ating!).

What the hell? Isn't this the same as ‘denying hell’ that he complained about?

It's scarcely different from the view of the Anglican church, which decided in 1996 that hell is not real but is merely the absence of God. That was a welcome departure from what A.C. Grayling and others call the ‘ugly coercive model’ but it's hard to imagine how the two views can be reconciled.

Even if the new model is more human-friendly, what this tells us is that no one really knows much about hell and there's no consensus whether it even exists. They can't abolish hell because it's mentioned dozens of times in the Bible, so they do the next best thing: redefine it into oblivion. Doesn't that mean, atheists would ask, that religion is man-made and therefore on shaky ground? How do we know religious people aren't just trying to scare us into doing what they want? Sadly, solid evidence about hell is the one thing we won't get until it's too late, if ever. Damn it.

All three authors on this page allude to Aquinas's idea that the dead have no free will, so people can't change their beliefs in the afterlife. But Aquinas went farther than that. What continues after death, he said, is only the remnant of the person awaiting resurrection. The disem­bod­ied soul thinks and wills but can't sense or feel anything. This always seemed contra­dic­tory to me: if you have no free will and can't feel anything, in what way are you conscious? And if you're not conscious, how can you be in hell? Maybe they could re-define hell to mean unconsciousness.

sep 30 2025. updated oct 03 2025