Visions of hell

The road there is paved with good intentions. But what about the place itself?

Paved? Hot? Full of people gnashing their teeth?

A metaphor for something even worse?

Theologians have been debating the particulars of hell since there have been gods and religion, offering interpretations about what the downside of the afterlife looks like: who resides there, whether it's temporary or permanent, a physical place or a state of being, whether it's about punishment or cleansing. Even people within the same religion don't always agree.

"You could call 10 Presbyterian ministers, and you'd probably get 10 different views of hell," says the Rev. Marvin Groote, executive director of the Presbytery of Utah.

In most Presbyterian churches, and in mainstream Protestant churches in general, you can go a year full of Sundays without hearing the preacher mention hell at all. In fact, back when he was a student pastor nearly 20 years ago, Groote delivered a sermon about hell, and when it was over, a member of the congregation sought Groote out, perplexed.

"I didn't think Presbyterians believed in hell anymore," the man said.

Groote himself grew up in a fundamentalist wing of the Presbyterian Church in Iowa, so he'd heard plenty of sermons full of fire and sulfurous brimstone and found that the fear of such a place kept him good. Then, as an adult, he prepared for the ministry by attending seminary — where hell was pretty much put on the back burner.

"When you go to seminary, there's not a great deal of emphasis on hell or the devil," says Groote. "The emphasis is on God's good grace and the saving grace of Jesus Christ." As an adult, he finds that "it's a whole lot easier to respond to God out of a desire to be part of the kingdom, rather than out of fear of not being in the kingdom." Still, he believes even now in a permanent "very unpleasant" version of hell.

Generally, the more fundamentalist the religion, the more hell figures into sermons, and the more concrete, vivid and scary a place hell is. "It's a hot, awful place," says Raquel Guerror, whose husband is pastor of United Pentecostal Church in Midvale. "It's a place of misery."

Our Western vision of hell is colored not just by the Bible, where the imagery is fairly mild, but by writers such as Dante (his Inferno includes people covered by boiling pitch and trapped in snake pits) and the rigorous sermons of 18th century Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards.