Who goes to hell?

Q: Who goes to hell? 

It’s a fair question…and a painful one. I’m very glad I’m not the one who decides. Thank God that neither I nor any other theologian holds that responsibility. The New Testament reminds us that even Jesus said of the great final day: “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (see Matthew 24:36). There are mysteries that belong to God alone.

Too often, the popular imagination has turned heaven and hell into a kind of moral scoreboard; the righteous go to paradise, the wicked to punishment. Many Christians have grown up thinking that belief itself is the ticket, as though the gospel were simply about escaping a fiery afterlife.

But that isn’t the story the Bible tells at all. The New Testament is not about souls leaving earth for a distant heaven or hell; it’s about God making all things new, a renewed creation where heaven and earth are finally joined. The opposite of that new creation isn’t eternal torment, but exclusion: to miss out, to be left outside of God’s new world.

That doesn’t mean everyone automatically enters that new world. The New Testament offers a stark choice: there is the possibility of final loss. Those who, by their choices, their actions or their hearts, persistently turn away from God’s life-giving love; those who say, in effect: “I don’t want anything to do with you” may, in the end, get what they insist on.

As CS Lewis put it so memorably in The Great Divorce (Collins): “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’”

Some people, tragically, so corrupt and distort others – individuals, nations, entire communities – that it’s hard to imagine them joyfully joining God’s new creation without first being utterly transformed. And yet we must be careful here. It’s dangerously easy to play God; to assume that we know who’s in and who’s out.

When people persistently and finally reject God, I suspect it may mean something like annihilation – not eternal conscious torment but ceasing to exist as the image-bearing humans we were made to be. They remain creatures, perhaps, but no longer reflect God’s glory into the world or return the world’s praise to him. They have, in a sense, unmade themselves.

That’s not a truth to gloat over. It should truly drive us to tears and to prayer, because God is “not wanting anyone to perish” (2 Peter 3:9) and we should desire that also. 

This is a question about trust. If we come to Jesus and say: “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24, NKJV) we can be sure of his embrace, even when our faith feels fragile.

The question of who goes to hell isn’t meant to satisfy curiosity. It’s meant to remind us that God is a good judge, that his mercy is deeper than our understanding and that we must always cling to Jesus in humble faith and hope.

Hear more from Tom Wright on the ‘Ask NT Wright Anything’ podcast premier.plus